Portrait: What is it with Stephen Dedalus and girls?

There was a punk tune in the late 1970s that is so obscure that I can't find it on You Tube. It really exists because Amazon has it. Anyway, the chorus of the song was,

Let's face it, the boy can't make it with girls

Every time I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I think of that song. Stephen Dedalus just seems to be one of those guys who is hopeless with girls. In Chapter 2 of the novel we get a series of impressionistic sketches of Stephen having various encounters with girls. The most telling of these is his encounter with "Mercedes", a girl who doesn't exist. This is worth reading at some length.

When he had broken up this scenery, weary of its tinsel, there would come to his mind the bright picture of Marseilles, of sunny trellises, and of Mercedes.

Outside Blackrock, on the road that led to the mountains, stood a small whitewashed house in the garden of which grew many rosebushes: and in this house, he told himself, another Mercedes lived. Both on the outward and on the homeward journey he measured distance by this landmark: and in his imagination he lived through a long train of adventures, marvellous as those in the book itself, towards the close of which there appeared an image of himself, grown older and sadder, standing in a moonlit garden with Mercedes who had so many years before slighted his love, and with a sadly proud gesture of refusal, saying:

—Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.

He has created this imaginary ideal only to reject her. And this ideal seems to be at the heart of his vision of art:

He returned to Mercedes and, as he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood. Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue. The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart. The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.

Regular readers will know that I don't put a lot of weight on feminist criticism but this passage aclls out for one. Notice how much responsibility this puts into the woman's hands. She has to do for Stephen what God the father did for Christ on the mountain top. What woman could meet this standard?

The answer, of course, is none. Young Stephen has an encounter with a nice girl riding home from a party on the tram but can't actually kiss her. (Joyce wouldn't appreciate this compliment, but it is a good enough scene for Meet Me in St. Louis.) But he can't kiss her even though he can clearly see that she wants to be kissed. Instead, he goes home and tries to write a poem and fails.

More importantly, Stephen wants this transformational connection to take place outside  normal social channels. The actual reality of Ireland (and "woman" and "Ireland" tend to be interchangeable in Joyce) depresses him. He can only write about an idealized Ireland from afar. He seems to feel almost the same about women except for the woman who can just come across with sex without all the social niceties and complications that get in the way.

This is a pretty standard teenage boy fantasy. What makes Stephen different, although not unique, is that he takes this typical teen boy fantasy and projects it up into the heavens. In the process, he impoverishes real women who can only pale next to the idealized woman and impoverishes Ireland which can only pale next to the ideal Ireland.

So next he goes to hookers. Only he doesn't really. The Stephen who ends up with the hooker is a bizarrely will-less creature who just gets pulled in. And notice how the hooker seems to fulfill the vision Stephen had for the imaginary Mercedes but that he wouldn't let the girl on the tram be.

With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.

Look, I'm a man and I have done my share of sexual sinning and would take back shockingly little of it but never have I seen sex as a transfiguring experience. 

The question is, Who believes this? Stephen obviously but what of Joyce? By the time we get to Ulysses, Joyce gives us a picture of Stephen the sinner which is more clearly condemnable. Stephen's refusal to kneel at the bedside of his dying mother is clearly a heinous act and his resistance to attempts to reconsider the matter are telling.

In Portrait we will also see Stephen try and face his sins and repent for them but something goes very wrong? I'll be honest, I don't know. And I haven't seen anyone else answer the question either.

It must be summer

As happened last year about this time, the number of page views has plunged here in the land of the pink and blue.

To me that says, it's time to switch to lighter fare: women, booze, cars music, television and movies from next Monday (Victoria Day) 'til Labour Day.

Sorta political: Little Stalins everywhere

We've made it more or less impossible for anyone to get rich, that is to get rich honestly, by devoting their lives to politics. Not surprisingly, that has created a political class who are motivated by power and corruption. Not necessarily by both. It's usually the power that attracts but corruption follows along pretty reliably a lot of the time.

But it's even worse than that for we have also made it impossible for politicians to be individuals. No male politician, for example, would dare sport a beard, a pretty mild expression of individualism. That means that the kind of people who drive our politics are more and more those drawn by bureaucratic power. That is we are governed by people who favour giving the power to regulate and control our lives to a credentialed class of bureaucrats.

And this put me in mind of IF Stone who, in an uncharacteristic moment of honesty, once admitted that communism tended to attract little Stalins everywhere. Nowadays, just about every political movement has its little Stalins.

They aren't full-blown monsters like the real Stalin and they never would become anything like him. But they exist in every movement and they draw the energy out of the movement with their relentless bureaucratic outlook. For example, feminism has its little Stalins. It's no worse or better than lots of other political movements but it came to mind when I read this:

The image of the feminist as a mirthless, hirsute, sex-averse succubus is a friendly-fire casualty of the Republican “war on women.”

Okay, that's crazy talk. The Republican "war on women" is actually just a Democrat talking point not, you know, something is actually happening. And the writer of the piece, one Rebecca Traister, promptly contradicts herself shortly after writing that sentence by admitting that people on her side of the political aisle also believe in this "stereotype":

The characterization is so potent and pervasive that lefties have also availed themselves of it. In 2005, liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas dismissed feminist complaints as the “humorless, knee-jerk . . . tedious” stuff of “the sanctimonious women’s-studies set.”

Trasiter's piece is so full of logical errors and inconsistencies that it probably sets new records. Several people have pointed out that a sex-adverse succubus makes as much sense as "dry water" or "cold heat". However, there is a certain metaphorical sense to that and I suspect Traister has been unfairly criticized on that point. A succubus was a demon said to appear to men in their dreams and induce them to have sex. She'd leave them drained and weak as a consequence.

The succubus is obviously a medieval scare tactic to stop men from masturbating. The succubus seems to like sex but the experience she offers is empty and unproductive (or unreprodutive). It makes, I think, metaphorical sense to speak of a type that has all the draining effects of the succubus while hating sex. To admit it makes sense, however, makes Traister's argument even more problematic.

For while the medieval succubus never existed, the sex adverse succubus who haunts feminism does and we all know she does.  Traister writes as if the sex- and man-hating feminist was something that had been made up by evil right-wingers to discredit feminists. No, I'm not saying that all feminists are like that. I will quite cheerfully testify that the vast majority of feminists I have met were not like that. When I was at university in the early 1980s, the most interesting, intelligent, fun-to-be-with and, yes, sexy, women on campus tended to be feminists.

But, minority she may be, the sex- and man-hating feminist was always part of the scene. She is the little Stalin of feminism devoted to increasing bureaucratic power and she not only still exists, she is is thriving.

And it is insane to pretend she doesn't exist. Anyone who brushes up against feminism will run into someone like her. Like the weather, however, no one does anything about her. Her devotion to the cause exceeds that of others so she puts in the long volunteer hours, accepts the lower paying job in the movement instead of the more promising career outside of it. While others become more and more involved with careers, husbands and children, she remains in the office doing all the things that need to be done that no one else is willing to do.

No one who actually knows her hates her for she is not hateful. Like most people, there are subjects you'd best avoid in conversation. She can even forget herself sometimes and be quite joyful and amusing. But she always recollects herself and gets back to her grim purpose. And, because others have other things to do, she tends to get her way. Sometimes she goes too far and provokes a backlash but she gets a good sense of just how far she can go.

She is at her best in meetings and can manœuver these to produce the results she wants. And because she, ironically, loves what used to be called "secretarial" duties, she controls the way organizational information is formulated, stored and disseminated. She knows the rules that were set up, with the best of intentions, to make things "fairer" and will push them relentlessly when it suits her purposes and forget about them when they do not, always confident that no one else has her special knowledge.

She is, in short, a bully. Like all bullies, she is aware enough of her weaknesses to keep them in check but the moment she gets in a position where she can exploit some power to her advantage, look out. Again, like all bullies, she doesn't use power for the sake of some additional end but for the sheer joy of wielding power itself.

The funny thing, if you get to know her well, is that you tend to pity her. And with good reason, as she lives a pitiable life with few real joys. She has never known the joys of love or sex and, certainly, never the two combined. Her power, when she gets it, never brings her any real satisfaction. But she sucks the energy out of everyone who has to work with her and she keeps doing that.

She is unavoidable and it is, as I say above, insane to to and pretend she doesn't exist. We all know better, I suspect even Rebecca Traister knows better.

Mad Men second thoughts

The callow youth* over at Slate are a favourite spot for me after writing my own thoughts about a Mad Men episode. They are reliably trite and shallow. And they sure do like piling it on the characters they hate.

Anyway, this time Patrick Radden Keefe and Julia Turner have it in for Don. Keefe says he's lost his respect for Don. And Don does smack down Ginsberg but good this episode. The problem is that Ginsberg richly deserves it. He describes Don to Roger as a tall guy with a  short temper and then is obnoxious towards Don and belittles his ideas. That's asking for it: pure hubris and it got what hubris always gets.

Turner, however, goes on to a limited defense of Betty that also deserves some comment.

But I do want to take a moment to defend Betty in this episode—or at least to marvel at a scene that perhaps demonstrated some growth. There was remarkable tenderness over that overdone steak in the Francis kitchen. And though Betty does, perhaps, wonder if she’s “bet on the wrong horse” with Henry, she also offers an uncommonly supportive little speech ...

But here is the thing, that "supportive little speech" is not unusual for Betty or someone like her are all.

This is a setback. You’re always thinking about other people, and then you’re angry because no one’s thinking about you. But I am. It’s so easy to blame our problems on others, but really we’re in charge of ourselves. And I’m here to help you, as you’re here to help me. We’ll figure out what’s next.

First, note that it is a lie. Betty doesn't think of Henry. She is a selfish and self-centred jerk.  No, this is exactly the speech that passive-aggressive exploiter like Betty would trot out in a situation like this. Her own interest is what drives her: Henry has to perform because she needs to feel competitive with Don. If you asked someone who hadn't yet seen this episode for an example of a person that Henry is always thinking of but who never thinks of him, Betty is the first example they'd come up with. If Betty had really changed and really cared, she would have started with an apology.


* Update, just in case it isn't obvious, all these insults are a joke of sorts—I am using the same sort of summary condemnation of Keefe and Turner that they use in describing characters on the show.

Mad Men: Dark Shadows

If you like your irony to be about as obvious as a slap in the face with a greasy fish and your moralizing trite and obvious, then Percy Bysshe Shelley is the poet for you.

And that is why Ginsberg quoting from Ozymandias is a problem. Anyone who knew the line well enough to trot it out on command would already know it is ironic. If you follow Stan's advice and go read the rest of the poem you'll discover that you don't need to read the rest of it because the irony is already obvious before you get to the line that Ginsberg quotes.

And the episode is called "Dark Shadows".

And it's got Betty in it.

"But you hate Betty!" Maybe, but I don't hate her nearly as much as the screenwriters do. There is a moment in this episode where Megan teaches Sally how to cry. She tells her to keep her eyes wide open and think of something that makes her sad. Well that's how the scriptwriters crank out Betty's parts, they keep their eyes wide open and think of some woman who treated them badly.

I love Roger though. Did anyone else look at this sketch

and think of Roger? It's a perfect Roger line in that nothing ever changes with Roger but he is always promising to change everything. You can just imagine Roger in the garden with Eve telling her that eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil will change everything. Except we don't have to imagine because it happens to poor Jane who ends up learning that knowledge of good and evil means looking at your new apartment and tasting the ashes in your mouth.

I love Roger. By the way, notice that Roger tends to charm people by telling them the truth and not by lying to them. When Roger asks Ginsberg to help him come up with an idea to pitch the Manischewitz people, Ginsberg cynically assumes that Roger will present them as his own ideas but when he is with the potential client, Roger cheerfully owns up that that he had the creative people come up with some ideas so "I could show you what we are capable of". The devil is a team player.

Rivalries
This episode was reminiscent of "The Summer Man", although not nearly so brilliant as that episode because it was rivalries that drove everything. Don goes into the office where Ginsberg and Peggy work and sees the subversive stuff Ginsberg has drawn up and that inspires him to try and match the guy.

By the way, the folder labelled "Shit I gotta do" is a false note. That is what someone would do in 2012.

But back to the moment. We've had a whole lot of set up beginning with Roger explaining to Bert how fishing is a competitive sport, not man versus fish but man versus man. And then we get a whole lot of male posturing. And then Joan shows Don a lot of work going into a portfolio and complements him for putting together "a lot of voices" in the creative department.

Okay, next Don goes into the office on a holiday and then he stands up and for a full 15 seconds we get a seemingly pointless shot in his office of him standing, lighting a cigarette and stretching in his office. Except that for the entire shot we can see Don's semi-erection which is clearly visible through his pants. Don't believe me? It starts at 5:15 on the iTunes version of the episode. It's not an accident. It's right in the centre of the shot.

Then Don walks down the hall and goes and spies on Ginsberg and then he goes back to his desk to prove he still has it.

And there is a rivalry between Betty and Sally that Sally, thanks for small mercies, wins.

I won't list them all.

As Woody Allen once parodied Hemingway: It was a good episode but not a great episode.

Final thought, the writers themselves are better of far better use of irony than Shelley. There is a lovely moment when Henry is having his midnight snack and talking to Betty and says,

"I bet on the wrong horse Betty."

He literally means in picking Lindsay to work for. But we immediately think of Betty. But the fascinating thing is that she doesn't see that. She is so wrapped up in her own petty rivalry with Don and Megan that she doesn't see it.

Now it's off to see what other people thought.

A little light culture: Revisiting Lady Lazarus

One of the things that I do to keep myself sane is to remind myself every once in a while that any political party that really represented my interests would be lucky to get one percent of the vote. When elections roll around, I don't go looking for anyone to represent me but rather pick the candidate who seems the least of the evils available that year.

A similar lesson should apply when it comes to culture. I love Mad Men and so do lots of other people but three percent of the television audience would be a huge audience for the show. Most people don't watch and they don't care. AMC, the network that produces the show, seriously considered not renewing it this year. They aren't losing money on it but they could probably make more from some other alternative. It could be cancelled anytime. For all we know AMC executives may have already decided that this is the last year.

But even if the show were as big as the Beatles it wouldn't matter that much. Cultural events rarely amount to anything political. A revolution that could be televised wouldn't be revolutionary.

Which brings me to NPR's Ann Powers who is rather miffed at the fact that Don Draper didn't like the Beatles tune he listened to. And the sentence she starts off with his telling:

Don Draper sure has a lot of power for a fictional character.

Meaning what? I suspect that it means that for Powers we're in a culture war and she is terrified Don is on the other side. She worries that he has a huge influence on how some young people are going to understand the sixties and how we understand the sixties is going to have a huge effect on the culture wars. Powers is worried that all the cool kids watching the show are going to think less of the Beatles and psychedelia because Don Draper pulled the needle up and walked away unimpressed. She may even be right.

Relevant disclosure: I sure hope so. Reading her piece on the subject gave me new hope that the series is going somewhere worthwhile this year after all. The only thing for sure is that the show is going to disappoint someone. It will either disappoint Ann Powers and people like her or it will disappoint me and people like me. We'll see. The fortunate thing is that it doesn't matter. Nothing really important hangs on the outcome. I'm not sure, though, that Ann Powers sees it that way. I suspect that rather a lot hangs on it for her.

But let's take a  deep breath and consider a few important facts. Let's start with Mad Men itself.
Never in the entire history of the show has it managed to attract more than one percent of North Americans. Walk down the street and remind yourself that most people you pass not only don't watch the show, the vast majority have never seen a single episode.

Now consider the Beatles. They had a much larger impact than Mad Men but most people alive in 1966 did not buy Beatles records. They were aware of the Beatles because they got a lot of news coverage and radio airplay and there was very little choice in music in those days. For most people that year the Beatles meant the two sided single with "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yellow Submarine".

Very few people bought Reviolver and even fewer sat around listening to "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the ones who did were oddballs and geeks.

But that shouldn't stop us. I mean, come on kids, Hey, hey they're the the Beatles! Lets listen to it backwards maybe it will make more sense! Or maybe not. Here is the couplet that we hear just before Don pulls the plug:

Love is all and love is everyone
It is knowing, it is knowing

Oooh deep. Well no, it's fatuous tripe, sophomoric and shallow right to its core. And sophomoric on acid doesn't make it any better. I know, it's not nice to point this out but it's true.

Let's back back to a few facts.

• Two years after te release of Revolver  Nixon was elected president. He won an even bigger majority the next time. Watergate deflated that for a while but Carter was a one termer and he was followed by Reagan.
• The late 1960s would provoke a huge normalcy backlash. In 1971, The Waltons would debut on TV and it would be one of the most popular shows on television for the next decade. A few years later it would be followed by the movie American Graffiti and the TV series Happy Days. Not only would these shows reach a huge audience, they would reach that audience with a sustained narrative. 
• The Beatles, OTOH, reached people with a lot of songs that could be easily separated from narratives people didn't like. With that in mind, which of the following sets of Beatles songs do you think reached the greatest number of people at the time and since?

1. "Tomorrow Never Knows", "She said, She said", "The Walrus", "Strawberry Fields", and "Come Together".
2. "Yesterday", "Eleanor Rigby", "When I'm 64", "Hey Jude", and "Something".

• For years and years after 1966, Madison Avenue went on making millions of dollars selling cigarettes, Jello, Canadian Club, Oldsmobile 98s, Kraft Dinner, Revlon, Swanson TV Dinners. No matter how important they are to you, all of those products had a bigger cultural impact than the Beatles.

And that is why Don Draper makes the right choice to pull the needle up and go to bed. No matter what they taught you in the Pop Culture course you took at university because you needed an easy A, the Beatles did not, as Ann Powers seems to think, transform, "pop marketing as much as music".

Manly Thor's Day Special: Under a court of law it wouldn't look like an accident

But it's not.

Does Vincent Kartheiser flub these lines? Logically, it would make more sense if he'd said, "Under a court of law it would look like an accident. But it's not." Maybe it doesn't matter. You know what he means. Women are allowed to say and do things that sound and look like invitations to you to get involved with them without committing themselves.

Oh yeah, this is all from an episode of Mad Men by the way. You don't have to have seen the episode to get the point though.

And I know, as everyone who did see the episode will say, it's Pete. But we have to care about these characters even though they are fictional characters. Obviously we don't treat them the same as real people. We don't get up and call 9-1-1 when a fictional character falls off a bridge but we should feel bad. Pete for all his failings is supposed to be a human being and we deprive ourselves of a proper enjoyment and understanding of fiction if we forget to respond to characters as human beings deserving our love and concern.

And have you never had the thoughts that Pete has here? These are thoughts we are all trained to keep to ourselves but all men have them. Maybe it was years ago so we don't remember or maybe we just don't have the courage to vent the angry thoughts that Pete does:

Work it over in their minds, turn it off and on when they feel like it. We're just there, waiting at attention.

Maybe you've never been there but I don't mind admitting that I have. I know from many years experience that you shouldn't express such feelings out loud. Best case scenario, people will laugh at you. Worst case scenario, you'll be branded as an unenlightened pig.

But women will do that to you. And it's not about sex or, to be more precise, it's not only about sex.

Let's go back to the dialogue (with the error I noted at the top noted):

Pete: Why do they give you a glimmer of hope in the midst of rejection. A little thread to hang on to. A misplaced word. Suggestion of the future.

Under a  court of law it wouldn't look like an accident. But it's not.

Harry: So we're not talking about Megan and we're not talking about Trudy?

Pete: Why do they decide what's going to happen?

Harry: They just do.

There is a lot more wisdom in Harry's response than we might give him credit for. That is the answer. Women just are the gatekeepers when it comes to love and sex. And the irony is that that is the result of the sexual revolution and feminism. In a society where women are repressed, their latitude for sexual expression is extremely limited by their being veiled or cloistered and some man, either her father or husband, is "supposed" to control her sexuality. In order to free women to say yes they also had to gain more power to say no.

Let's have a look at another of Pete's questions again:

Why do they give you a glimmer of hope in the midst of rejection. A little thread to hang on to. A misplaced word. Suggestion of the future.

The two choices aren't "yes" and "no" but "yes" and "maybe". Why? Part of it may be a cynical exploitation of power. Part of it may be the fear of having to acknowledge to herself that she is cutting you off after leading you on. Part of it may be the fear that you'll show up outside her room  screaming and shouting in the middle of the night or that you may kill yourself or something.

Most likely, though, she does it because that is the way she likes it. She was attracted enough to you to flirt with you and even if she decides, for whatever reasons, not to allow anything else to happen she doesn't want to close the door and lock it.  It suits her vanity to think it might be possible even though she won't. She is still denying herself but she is the one doing the denying and there is a certain power that goes with that. (That's why "negging" her and walking away instead of giving her a chance to reject you often works as a seduction technique. It leaves her feeling powerless and a lot of women will go to surprising lengths to regain that power.)

In the case of Pete, the internal logic of the show works against the interaction with Beth ever being convincing. On Mad Men people end up having sex too quickly. In real life, the relationship between Beth and Pete would have been more protracted. They would have known one another longer before anything happened. And a lot less would have happened. They might have just kissed and then stopped and then things would have built up until they had sex. And then Beth would have thought, "I can't do this," and pulled out.

As Gaius noted in the comments, the moment when Beth makes the heart on the fogged window in the carpark next to Pete was the most unbelievable moment in the episode. I agree but I think that is largely because they left out all the emotional stage-setting that would have had to take place around that affair. For the show, love is sex but for most of the rest of us, sex is a kind of love. But if they had taken the time to build up the story a bit, then the heart would have made perfect sense.

There is a woman I was in love with many years ago whom I occasionally run into. We're both married now but every time we talk she says or does something that suggests that, for her, the door is still open. I wouldn't pursue her in any case but even if I did I would be crazy to take those hints as assurance of her acceptance. For whatever reason of her own, she won't close that door and she can't help letting it show when she is with me.

She feels entitled to do this and society backs her up. If I let any similar hints drop in her direction, it would be tantamount to asking her for sex and it would seem that way in a court of law. This is not just a metaphor. We never can be sure her acts are intentional enough to condemn her. We'd unhesitatingly condemn the man who did the same thing.

And that, as Harry says, is just the way it is.

And the unspoken assumption behind this is that men will always be there waiting, as Pete says, "at attention". And yes, that does mean everything it seems to mean.