Gloom v. Cheerfulness

Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown" strikes me today as a spooky Halloween morality tale. He may just have written it for fun, to entertain a room full of children around a holiday hearth. Of course, we are probably right to read it also as commentary on the dislocations of the Puritan temperament which led to the abuses of the Salem Witch Trials. But, Hawthorne may in addition have thought to make a case against the affectation of a gloomy disposition in response to the presence of evil in the world. Therein lies its anagogic value as a morality tale. Hawthorne is reminding us of the importance of cheerfulness, of lightness, much as Nietzsche did later.

The Fall of the House of Atreus

Dupin and the Minister are brothers. The reference to the twin brothers Atreus and Thyestes is evidence of that. This fact adds a degree of probability to Dupin's insight into the Minister's habits of mind. Poe's Prefect of Police is incapable of locating the stolen letter, whereas Dupin is successful. Dupin identifies with the mind of the criminal, which is both poetic and mathematical. And this is the crux of the issue. The Prefect's dependence on mathematical logic and scientific rigor to catch a thief makes him, according to Dupin, guilty of fallacious reasoning. Just because the Minister is a "poet" does not necessarily mean that he is also a "fool." But to act on that assumption is very foolish indeed, as Dupin points out with relish. Poe quotes Chamfort's aphorism that all conventional wisdom is foolishness, as well as Seneca, who states that "Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness." In other words, Dupin gives voice to Poe's lack of confidence in the ability of science to solve all the problems of man. By applying empirical notions to our study of psychology and ethics we err, "What is true of relation - of form and quantity - is often grossly false in regard to morals."

The Use of Force Justified

"No ideas but in things," said William Carlos Williams. The short story "The Use of Force" seems to live up to this writer's credo. His characterization in particularly is striking. From a first person narrator's point of view, Williams takes the reader on a house call into what appears to be a working class family's health care choices. Alternately fawning, embarrassed, apologetic, cowardly, and distrustful the parents do not appear as child advocates. They waited three days before calling in the doctor in the hopes of saving three dollars instead of calling him in immediately once they suspected diphtheria. Notice how the father pulls back for fear of contracting the disease from his daughter. However, the girl is afraid of doctors and gives him a good fight; she lies about her "sore throat" but he respects her for it. She is a Shirley Temple-like child portrayed as willful, catlike, furious, and ultimately defeated, perhaps as much by the doctor's good intentions as by the squalor her family inhabits. Yet, she retains her youthful dignity in the doctor's eyes, while the parents become more and more contemptible. The doctor, too, has a bit of a hard-boiled cast to him, like a detective in a Chandler novel. And we see his Hippocratic Oath in action, at first not wishing to discomfort the child but then acting, come what may, from a sense of duty to the community and to his patient to stem the spread of a highly contagious disease which can be fatal if untreated. The use of force, in this case, seems justified, and the short story appears to us like a page out of the doctor's log, but goes beyond its usefulness in that regard. Especially, the last line which characterizes the girl as trying to attack the doctor "while tears of defeat blinded her eyes" does not have any clinical bearing; but rather gives us a description of her physical state, which reveals her inner character.

But here is another reading: Violence as "unjust force" is opposed to force, which means "to constrain to do or to forbear, by the exertion of a power not resistible." Power, in the Orwellian sense, is always power to inflict pain. So the girl may have used violence, and the doctor force. But as long as we are selfish there will always be a governement of "force" (Emerson, Politics). Because the doctor tends to be selfish, the girl's freedom is prostituted: the doctor, who is in power, subverts his (and her) capacity for empathy and compassion by the use of force, thus playing on her fears and sorrows (see Sarah Wider). Such is healthcare in America!

Ebro is indeed in the crook of the intersection of two rail lines in central eastern Spain. In a few bold strokes Ernest Hemingway's short, short story "Hills Like White Elephants" describes the locus of the train station at Ebro and is geographically true. Moreover, his description of the terrain and weather has the crispness of a journalistic report, and his attention to detail does not overlook the exact time his characters must wait for the train bound for Madrid--forty minutes. In fact, the entire story takes place between two lovers, a man and a girl, during a forty minute wait in a train station at Ebro under a hot sun. While the lovers wait, they drink beer and anis, and make sneering, snide, and sarcastic comments to each other. They are in the grips of a pressing decision that affects both of them, i.e. whether to go through with an abortion or carry the pregnancy to term. The dialogue is spare, pared down to the bone, so to speak, and focused on the matter between them, about which they lie to themselves and each other. The atmosphere is oppressive, infernally hot, and already loveless. The only lightness that enters the picture, like a breeze, is the simile the girl makes: she compares the hills to white elephants. That is the only gratuitous moment in the entire story, which like the life of the fetus, is allowed to live for only a beat.