White Teeth: “Archie 1974, 1945”

I. Characters

The opening section of the novel introduces us to a number of characters who will become prevalent throughout the rest of the book, some moreso than others.

Alfred Archibald Jones: The novel opens with Archie attempting and failing to commit suicide by gassing himself in the parking lot of a halal butcher shop (he’s told he can’t gas himself there because the shop isn’t licensed for that; such is the dark humor of the novel). After his suicide attempt falls through, he finds a new lease on life—Smith writes that “he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood” (15): the past is problematic, but the future looks bright. This hits upon one of the main themes of the novel, that our past actions and situations will irrevocably have an impact on our futures. (The epigraph of the novel is “What is past is prologue,” which comes from Act 2, Scene 1 of The Tempest, but which Smith humorously attributes to an inscription in a Washington, D.C. museum.)

With a cheery new outlook, Archie eventually finds himself at a New Year’s Eve party with such colorful characters as the spaced-out Merlin (his real name is Tim) and the bare-chested Chinese girl, Wan-Si. Here, he meets Clara Bowden, whom he marries six weeks later. This impetuousness seems completely alien to the Archie we first meet, who decided to commit suicide, after all, because he wasted thirty years in a loveless marriage. Smith describes him as such:

[Archie] was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios:

Pebble: Beach.

Raindrop: Ocean.

Needle: Haystack. (10)

Being a relatively unimportant person in the long scheme of things, Archie might seem an ineffective character; but to the contrary, not only is he important enough to lend his name to this first section of the novel, but his “past is prologue” to later events. I will expand upon his past in World War II with his best friend, Samad (another major character in the novel) further down in this post.

Clara Bowden

Clara, a young Jamaican woman who becomes Archie’s new wife, has a revealing past of her own: her mother, Hortense, is an intense Jehovah’s Witness who believes the world is ending on January 1, 1975 (the same day Archie decides to commit suicide, incidentally), and who expects her daughter’s religious fervor to match her own. Though Clara, long before meeting Archie, dutifully does as Hortense asks, including distributing the Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet Watchtower around the neighborhood, she never quite grasps onto the religion in the same way as her mother. Indeed, all it takes is a boy, Ryan Topps (see below), to derail her religiosity. She meets Ryan one day while out distributing Watchtower pamphlets, and “that afternoon there were furtive rumblings on Ryan’s couch (which went a good deal further than one might expect of a Christian girl) and the devil won another easy hand in God’s poker game” (Smith 31).

(God, I love Smith’s hilarious prose in this novel.)

The two of them make a good pair, being outcasts at the Catholic school they both attend, though things turn sour: Ryan’s would-be rebelliousness rubs off on Clara, who soon begins attending parties and wearing more revealing clothes, and Ryan—much to Clara’s horror—eventually becomes a fervent Jehovah’s Witness himself, thanks to Hortense’s intervention. As Ryan gains religion, Clara loses hers. One fateful day, Ryan attempts to witness to Clara while riding his beloved motor scooter; he loses control and slams into a tree. Though he walks away unscathed, the entire top row of Clara’s teeth is knocked out, a not insignificant event in a novel titled White Teeth. Ryan’s witnessing fails, and Clara ends up at the very commune with Merlin and Wan-Si where she will eventually meet Archie. (As it turns out, this commune is where Ryan used to get weed in his pre-witnessing days.) Clara sarcastically suggests an “End of the World” theme for the commune’s New Year’s Eve party (thanks to her mother’s belief in the impending—and non-existent—end of the world), and not long after, she meets her soon-to-be husband at the foot of some stairs.

Though Clara will not have as major an impact on the novel as Archie or other characters, she certainly is central to the narrative, not the least because she eventually gives birth to Irie, one of White Teeth‘s most strongly realized central characters. The fact that Clara is Black also has importance in the novel: we see that Archie is disinvited from company dinners because Clara’s blackness makes his white coworkers uncomfortable, for example, and her Jamaican heritage echoes Smith’s own. Furthermore, the loss of her teeth is the first instance of the symbolic value of teeth in the novel: as becomes apparent over the course of the narrative, teeth symbolize (among other things) the vulnerability of people of color, and the fact that Clara loses hers immediately before marrying the (safe but boring) white Brit Archie suggests she loses at least a bit of this vulnerability in that fateful scooter crash, not long before meeting her future husband.

Samad Miah Iqbal

Samad, Archie’s best friend and World War II compatriot, is an unhappy Bangladeshi waiter at an Indian themed restaurant called the Palace. He works long hours (six in the evening until three in the morning) and customarily receives abuse from Shiva, one of his fellow waiters, and condescension from Ardashir, his boss and distant cousin. He is further impaired by a right hand that lies limp (he won’t have it amputated; “Every bit of my body comes from Allah,” he will eventually say. “Every bit will return to him” [Smith 76]). He is married (by an arranged marriage) to Alsana, though their marriage is decidedly not a happy one. The Iqbals (or “Ick-Balls,” as all the British characters in the novel recklessly mispronounce the name) attend Archie’s and Clara’s marriage ceremony, and the two couples begin lives that will parallel one another throughout the rest of the narrative.

We quickly learn that Samad is not living the life he once hoped he’d live. He wishes he could wear a large placard, for instance, that says:

I am not a waiter. I have been a student, a scientist, a soldier, my wife is called Alsana, we live in East London but we would like to move north. I am a Muslim but Allah has forsaken me or I have forsaken Allah, I’m not sure. I have a friend—Archie—and others. I am forty-nine but women still turn in the street. Sometimes. (Smith 49)

Samad’s conflict with his religious beliefs is one of the long running internal conflicts in the novel. In the next section, this becomes much more apparent, but he does show some discontent early on. Consider how his imaginary placard mentions that “Allah has forsaken me or I have forsaken Allah,” for instance.

Like Archie, Samad’s significance in the novel will diminish (though not disappear, not hardly) in the second half; however, also like Archie, he predominates the first half. Like Clara, the fact that he and his family are not white is also significant, though this significance won’t come to a head until later in the novel.

Alsana Begum Iqbal

Alsana is what my grandfather would call a “spitfire”: she is “not as meek as [Samad] had assumed when they were married…[she] was prone to moments, even fits—yes, fits was not too strong a word—of rage” (Smith 51). Like Clara, she is about twenty-five years younger than her husband, though unlike Clara, her marriage is not one of choice but of arrangement. In fact, Samad mentions to Archie way back in World War II that he is arranged to marry her, even though at that point she hadn’t even been born. Their marriage is quite physical, but not in the sexual way: during one heated argument about food, “Alsana punched [Samad] full square in the stomach” (Smith 52). Fits of rage, indeed.

Her anger no doubt comes from the fact that she descends from a well respected Bangladeshi family and yet has found herself married to a relatively poor, one-armed waiter, working for a sex shop called Domination, sewing together studded hot pants and the like. Much to her [apparent] chagrin, she associates with her niece, Neena, whom she calls her “Niece-of-Shame” because of Neena’s progressive attitudes. (Ironically, we later learn that Alsana is only two years older than Neena, so they are closer to sisters than aunt/niece).

Alsana, once she and Clara become simultaneously pregnant, vents about their husbands’ ages: “[Our children] will always have daddy-long-legs for fathers. One leg in the present, one in the past…Their roots will always be tangled. And roots get dug up” (Smith 68). This hits upon the “past is prologue” theme that recurs throughout the novel: Archie’s and Samad’s pasts will always come back to affect not only herself and Clara, but also and more importantly their children. And eventually, these pasts will be fleshed out (“dug up”).

Ryan Topps

Ryan is certainly the least significant character in this first section of the novel, though he does continually reappear throughout the rest of the narrative, much to the chagrin of certain characters. He first meets Clara when she was younger, in her pre-Archie days when she still had her top teeth. Styling himself as something of a mod, he loves nothing else in the world so much as his motor scooter, and he sees himself as a James Dean-esque “rebel without a cause,” envisioning dying tragically in a motor scooter crash (despite the fact that his scooter tops out at 22 mph downhill). He is, we learn, the Last Man on Earth—that is, a guy no girl at his school would date even if he were the last man alive.

As mentioned above, he and Clara eventually begin a romantic relationship that ends when Ryan becomes a Jehovah’s Witness. Smith writes, “[A]nd Ryan—what was happening to Ryan?—shed his turtleneck, avoided [Clara] in school, bought a tie” (34).

Ryan’s conversion to a Jehovah’s Witness will become an issue later in the novel, much more pressing than simply being the proverbial nail in the coffin of his and Clara’s relationship. Again, though a minor character, he is worth mentioning here due to his later, relative importance.

II. Chapter Five: The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal

Root canals are a procedure wherein an infection is “rooted out” and removed from the roots of teeth. In White Teeth, the chapters bearing the “Root Canal” moniker deal with rooting up problems of the past that affect the present and future. Chapter Five covers the World War II adventures of Archie and Samad, and the events of this section will haunt the rest of the novel.

Both privates working in a five-man Churchill tank in Eastern Europe in April 1945, Archie and Samad strike up their friendship after the rest of their unit is killed by (apparently) raiders. Because the radio has also been damaged, they cannot immediately call for help; when they eventually fix the radio and make the requisite call, no one comes. They take up residence in a nearby Bulgarian village and hang about until a Soviet unit arrives in search of a Nazi collaborator, Dr. Marc-Pierre Perret. Archie and Samad know Perret as “Dr. Sick,” after hearing the name from a local child, though they have never bothered to meet him; they only know that he lives in a large house on a bluff above the village. They help the Russians capture Dr. Perret, and Archie eventually (apparently) shoots him—though he returns from this shooting, strangely, with shrapnel embedded in his leg.

One of the most important elements introduced in this chapter is the story of Mangal Pande, Samad’s great-grandfather who fired the shot that started the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Samad will dwell on and repeat this story for the remainder of the novel. He takes great pride in the story, as it depicts one of his family members performing a noble and historical act. Unfortunately for Samad, nobody particularly seems to care about the story or the fact that Pande was Samad’s great-grandfather. Archie, for instance, repeatedly refers to Pande as Samad’s great-uncle. The story of Pande is a situation from the past, however, and like many other things in this novel, it will inevitably have importance in the future.

Indeed, the “past is prologue” theme resonates in this chapter. While high on morphine he leeches from a deserted hospital, Samad tells Archie,

“We are creatures of consquence, Archibald,” [Samad] said, gesturing to the church walls. “They knew it. My great-grandfather knew it. Someday our children will know it.”

“Our children!” sniggered Archie, simply amused. The possibility of offspring seemed so distant.

“Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies.” (Smith 86-87)

In other words, the pasts of Archie and Samad (and, indeed, all people in the past of most of the novel’s central characters) will have a direct impact on their children, the future. We will see later in the novel how Archie’s and Samad’s children are impacted by their family members’ pasts. This chapter, the first “root canal” in the novel, digs up the first bit of past that will have consequence in the future.

Batman: Reflecting on my life with a pop culture icon

Batman first appeared in May of 1939 in DC’s Detective Comics #27, created by comic book writer Bill Kane and illustrator Bill Finger. The character has undergone a series of reboots and revamps over the past several decades, going from a dark and morally ambiguous vigilante to an unabashed do-gooder, to a cheesy, cartoonish character, back to dark and morally ambiguous, to the Dark Knight who operates by a strict code—this latter incarnation being the one most contemporary audiences are familiar with. Perhaps more than any other comic book superhero, including Superman and the plethora of action stars spotlighted in the massive catalogue of Marvel films and TV shows, Batman has left an indelible impression on American pop culture. His portrayal has shifted over time to accommodate the tastes of different time periods, and he exists now as a figure that people who don’t even like comic books or superhero movies know and understand. He is an icon—a brand, really—that has become enmeshed in American pop culture in a way few superheroes or action stars have. He appears in comic books, prose books, films, tv shows, and video games, not to mention the countless toys that have appeared on shelves over the years. My own experience with Batman has been within each of these media, and he has left an indelible impression on my own person.

It’s hard to say when the first time I became acquainted with Batman was, but I’m almost certain it was through the classic and unabashedly cheesy Batman: The Movie (1966), which I watched more than a few times in early childhood. Complete with onomatopoeic POWs! and SMACKs!, it is a fun story about Batman (Adam West) and Robin (Burt Ward) foiling a plot being masterminded by his rogue’s gallery, including the Penguin (Burgess Meredith), the Joker (Cesar Romero), and the Riddler (Frank Gorshin). I’m not sure I could watch this film in earnest anymore, nor the TV show the movie is based on, but I remember it fondly, in the same way you remember a cartoon you enjoyed as a kid. That being said, I love showing people this delightfully campy scene from the Batman TV series in which Batman tries with great difficulty to dispose of a bomb:

The first time I thought of Batman as “cool” was when I saw Tim Burton’s films, Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), starring Michael Keaton in the titular role. There was apparently a lot of griping about Keaton being cast as the Dark Knight when Burton’s film was first announced, because Keaton was at the time known as a comic actor, while the Batman comics of the ’80s had moved away from the campiness of the earlier decades and taken on a darker tone (thanks in large part, no doubt, to Frank Miller’s seminal—though in retrospect problematic—graphic novel, The Dark Knight Returns). Keaton turned out to be a great Batman and a quiet and socially awkward Bruce Wayne. Burton’s movies are action packed and include some memorable villains, particularly Jack Nicholson as the Joker, Danny DeVito as a thoroughly disgusting Penguin, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, whose natural beauty and tight leather suit made me feel things my ten year old self didn’t quite understand. These films are also noticeably dark (and weird), but not so offputting that they are not family friendly. My family owned the ’89 Batman on VHS, and I wore that tape out. At this point, I still hadn’t ventured into Batman comics—that wouldn’t come until adulthood—but Batman was by now a pop culture icon who had left an indelible impression on my young mind.

Batman: The Animated Series also captivated me as a kid. Here was a cartoon that, like Burton’s films, didn’t shy away from darkness. Though some of the storylines were silly (like the Joker exposing fish to his Joker Venom), other storylines were heartfelt and resonated with me (the arc involving Mr. Freeze’s quest to save his wife Nora is particularly poignant). Kevin Conroy’s voice acting as Batman and Mark Hamill’s voice acting as the Joker have since become legendary. Also, the title sequence gave us this iconic image of Batman, standing atop a roof with lightning cracking in the background. Indeed, to this day this image remains one of the Batman archetypes that lurks in my psyche.

The Batman movies of the ’90s were disappointing, even to me as a kid at the time, because they were venturing back into the campiness that I thought the character had moved away from. The most unforgivable sins of those movies are without a doubt director Joel Schumacher’s inexplicable decisions to put nipples on George Clooney’s Batsuit and to include a ludicrous scene with a “Bat Credit Card” in 1997’s Batman and Robin. (What bank would carry that card? Wouldn’t that destroy Batman’s anonymity? Or does Batman somehow have credit?) By that point, I thought my love of Batman was over, save from rewatching Burton’s films. Batman had become unwatchable again, and for years, culture would be left thinking of George Clooney’s diligent but ultimately corny take on the character.

And then, in 2005, Christopher Nolan—perhaps the most innovative and successful director of his generation—saved the Batman movie franchise with the fantastic Batman Begins. Christian Bale became the de facto face of Batman/Bruce Wayne, moreso than any previous actor had, including Michael Keaton. The key to Batman Begin‘s success is the fact that it is grounded in reality: Batman’s gadgets are based on reasonably realistic equipment (e.g., cave diving implements), and though the Batmobile became a literal tank (more on that later), it was realistically an invention created for the US military. Borrowing heavily from Frank Miller’s less problematic Batman: Year One, Nolan crafted a movie that gives Batman a reason for doing what he does, above simply getting revenge for his parents’ murder. More than that, the filmmaking is outstanding. Consider this fantastic scene, where Batman makes his first appearance effortlessly taking out mob boss Carmine Falcone’s thugs:

There is so much to marvel at in this scene: the lighting, the building suspense, the fight choreography that renders Batman nearly invisible even in the midst of a melee, and the incredible climax that resolves with the iconic line, “I’m Batman.” With Batman Begins, Nolan gave us not just a good Batman film, but cinema. Batman was cool once again, and more than that, he was featured in a critically acclaimed movie.

The Dark Knight, Nolan’s second Batman feature, is one of those rare sequels that transcends the original. This is due in large part to the phenomenal acting of the late Heath Ledger as the Joker (for which he posthumously won an Academy Award), though the story is still enthralling and the action set pieces are (mostly) practical and extraordinarily choreographed. Still, the scene that sticks out in my mind the most is the scene in which Batman interrogates the Joker about the whereabouts of District Attorney Harvey Dent:

Ledger is electric in this scene; he is compulsively watchable. This is only one of the rare moments where Batman is disarmed, which is a refreshing thing to see. “You have nothing! Nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength.” Bale does a great job showing Batman’s helplessness in this moment by holding his hands out, grasping at nothing, as though he is searching for the right button to press on the Joker—but of course, he can”t find it.

Nolan’s third and final entry in his Dark Knight trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, is clearly the weakest of his three Batman films, but even it is extremely well made. Consider the visceral filming of Batman’s failed attempt to fight Bane—a difficult scene to watch for most Batman fans:

Borrowing in part from the Knightfall comics storyline (wherein Bane breaks Batman’s back) and containing traces of the No Man’s Land storyline, The Dark Knight Rises ends up doing its own thing, teaming a rejuvenated Batman up with a disjointed Gotham PD to fight Bane and his terrorists. In retrospect, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises feel problematic, because both seem to make the case that, at times at least, fascism is necessary, just as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns did in the ’80s. Still, Nolan’s Batman films clearly rehabilitated the character from the Joel Schumacher’s films and paved the way for other terrific Batman media, like the Arkham series of video games.

And then came Zack Snyder. Look, Snyder has a good eye for visuals—his DC movies, Man of Steel (2013), Batman v. Superman (2016), and Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021) all look great. The heroes all look cool, and the fight choreography is generally fun, but Snyder’s movies rarely make sense beyond the visuals and fight sequences. Why are Batman and Superman fighting? Reasons. Why is Batman branding the criminals he beats up? Because it looks cool? I don’t know—nobody knows except maybe Snyder. And what is Snyder’s penchant for telling a story about evil Superman?! (WHO WANTS THAT STORY?!) Ben Affleck does a fine job as Batman/Bruce Wayne in those movies, but he’s given terrible scripts to work with, and I’m sure Snyder’s direction was no help. There are exactly two good scenes in Batman v. Superman: Batman’s warehouse fight where he saves Martha Kent (in fairness to Snyder, this is probably the best Batman brawl caught on film):

and the final showdown between Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, and the Doomsday creature (though Wonder Woman’s theme does a lot of the heavy lifting here):

***

By the Snyder era of DC films, I had delved deeply into the Batman comics, particularly those collected into graphic novels. I read The Dark Knight returns in high school and thought it was cool, but it didn’t really grab my attention. The Long Halloween, however, which was recommended to me by a librarian, changed everything I thought I knew about Batman comics. This wasn’t just cheap pulp; it was noir and it was enthralling. I found the story of Harvey Dent’s rise and fall and Batman’s relentless pursuit of a serial killer who murders people on holidays to be utterly engrossing. Written by Jeph Loeb and drawn by Tim Sale, The Long Halloween immediately became my favorite Batman story. It truly shows Batman as the World’s Greatest Detective, and the ending is ambiguous enough that it leaves you wanting to go back and turn over every stone that Loeb leaves scattered here and there.

At this point, I knew many different characterizations of many different Batmen: Adam West’s campiness, Michael Keaton’s stoicism, (let’s skip over Val Kilmer and George Clooney, because I certainly do), Christian Bale’s gruff genius, and Ben Affleck’s jaded brawler. But the Batmen of the comics were almost always the same: tough, highly trained, unbelievably intelligent, and, occasionally, witty. After The Long Halloween, I enjoyed Comics Batman in such fantastic titles as Alan Moore’s influential The Killing Joke, Grant Morrison’s horrifying Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, Jeph Loeb’s Hush, and Scott Snyder’s The Court of Owls Saga, among many others. Indeed, Comics Batman has become my favorite incarnation of the Dark Knight. By this point in my life, Batman wasn’t just a character that I enjoyed; he was an icon that had become enmeshed in my understanding of American pop culture.

***

It’s fascinating analyzing the transformation of Batman throughout the past several decades. His rule of no killing, for example, was not always a feature of his character. But he has clearly undergone many changes: from campy to stoic to cheesy to realistic to…whatever Zack Snyder was trying to do with the character. A few years ago, when discussing the cultural impact of Batman, one of my students coined the term “Military Batman” in reference to post-9/11 Batman (see Nolan’s films and the Arkham video games, where Batman uses explosives, tanks, and other military equipment to somehow not kill bad guys). Matt Reeves’s terrific movie, The Batman (2022), wherein Robert Pattinson gives us a brooding—my students say “emo”—Batman, has added a new perspective to the character, but that film owes more to David Fincher’s detective thriller Seven than to any previous superhero movie. Like in The Long Halloween, Reeves’s The Batman shows us a Batman who doesn’t just beat up thugs but also does thorough detective work.

If there is one thing that Reeves’s The Batman proves, it’s that there are still different interpretations of the character out there. I look forward to seeing them. I’m particularly curious about how James Gunn’s new DC film universe will portray the character in the upcoming Batman: The Brave and the Bold, because Gunn is a filmmaker whose films I enjoy and who, I think, understands how to adapt superheroes to the screen (see his Guardians of the Galaxy films [2014, 2017, and 2023] and The Suicide Squad [2021]—that is, the good Suicide Squad movie).

For me, at this point in my life, Batman is a cultural icon who transcends any other icon in my purview, and that’s saying quite a lot. I passed my fascination of the character onto my son relatively early in his life, and we now both share a passion for all Batman media.

(I sent this meme to him not long ago—LOL.)

Some might consider my fascination with Batman to be immature, but my interest in the character has grown from “ohh, that’s cool!” to “ohh, that’s terrific characterization!” Some Batman media is extremely high quality, Nolan’s films and The Long Halloween being prime examples. Batman stories are rarely just “kid’s stuff.” Rather, Batman is a complex character with usually complex stories who will continue to fascinate comic book readers and film goers for a long time to come.

White Teeth, by Zadie Smith

• 

  Zadie Smith in 2000

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, her debut novel in 2000 (she was only 25 when it was published), is one of the only novels I’ve ever read that consistently makes me laugh out loud, even upon multiple re-readings. Smith has since criticized her initial novel (she once once said of it,

“The truth is, it could do with some touching up. If it were a perfect piece of statuary, then no, one wouldn’t want anybody’s grubby fingers upon it. But it’s not, it’s more like a fat, messy kid who needs help” [Jordinson]),

but I still find it her most compulsively readable novel. Even upon multiple rereadings, I have an easier time getting through it than I do with, say, On Beauty (2005). I think a great deal of this has to do with the characters, who are funny, infuriating, and endlessly compelling.

Chief among these characters are Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, whose friendship forms the core of the novel’s narrative. Their families intertwine in often humorous and sometimes tragic ways. Archie is a typical white, middle class, no-nonsense Brit who bumbles his way through his life and experiences, while Samad is a Bangladeshi immigrant to the UK who is haunted by his great-grandfather’s past actions and the idea that his children will grow up without an understanding or appreciation of their cultural heritage. Like many immigrant parents, he fears his children are becoming more enmeshed in the culture of their adopted country and losing touch with their family’s roots. Both men meet during World War II and are involved in an incident involving a sickly French scientist and Nazi collaborator named Dr. Perret, sometimes known as “Dr. Sick” because of an illness that causes him to shed tears of blood. This situation becomes vital later on in the book, but it nevertheless solidifies the relationship between Archie and Samad. For the next several decades, they are more or less inseparable, spending more time with each other in a pub, O’Connell’s, than with their families. Their interactions are often humorous, and as they get older, they become noticeably more irascible and air-brained as they understand their children less and less.

Archie’s and Samad’s family members are no less memorable or compelling. Clara, Archie’s wife, is the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant, Hortense Bowden, a fantatical Jehovah’s Witness; despite being forced to do various tasks for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Clara rebelliously develops a high school fling with a dope named Ryan Topps who loves his motor scooter more than just about anything else, except maybe the Kinks and marijuana (until Hortense converts him, too, to be a Jehovah’s Witness). Then there is Alsana, Samad’s wife, a self-possessed and hardworking woman who has little time for her husband’s bullshit. (Or her son Millat’s bullshit, for that matter.) Some of the funniest interactions in the book take place between Samad and Alsana, who often resort to fisticuffs when their arguments inevitably get out of hand. These relationships dominate the first half of the novel, whereas the latter is focused on the Jones and Iqbal children.

Irie, the daughter of Archie and Clara, and Millat and Magid, the twin sons of Samad and Alsana, are for their parts incredibly engaging, perhaps moreso than their parents. Their stories eventually become entwined with that of the Chalfens, a pretentious family of intellectuals who are in most respects the polar opposites of the Joneses and Iqbals. As the novel winds towards its climax, each child grows up and becomes engaged in a variety of big-minded, sometimes radical, causes and organizations. Contrary to what Smith has said of the novel’s ending (she called it “calamitous” [Jordinson]), I find it to be completely fitting with the previous 450 pages or so. The last line still makes me chuckle, and I don’t think it would leave me with such a favorable impression if it were edited down. The Jones and Iqbal children resonate with me, not just because I teach students who resemble them in many regards, but also because Smith has characterized them so fully that they practically step off the page as living, breathing humans in a way that the older characters never quite do. (Archie and Samad ultimately come across as caricatures, however expertly crafted, whereas the children seem positively genuine.)

White Teeth is one of my favorite novels to teach, and I am about to embark on another year of reading it with my IB English seniors. I can’t wait to hear the students’ reactions. I tell them that it’s a comic novel, though I warn them it begins with Archie’s attempted suicide—which, contrary to what you might think, is still rendered humorously. Students in the past have either loved it or were apathetic towards it, though I can’t recall anyone outright hating it.

Over the next several weeks, I will be recording my own thoughts upon re-reading the novel as well as my students’ responses. My annual White Teeth study is one of my favorite literature units, and I cannot wait to get this year’s started.

***

Works Cited

Jordinson, Sam. “How White Teeth transcends its many flaws.” The Guardian, Jul 21, 2020.

Juliet: A Study

Juliet by John William Waterhouse (1898)

Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the first play in which Shakespeare strikes a balance between lyricism, intense pathos, and wisdom. This is nowhere else more evident than in the character of Juliet, who joins her doomed lover in an untimely death, but who for much of the play demonstrates a cognitive power unseen in Shakespeare’s previous plays. Unlike Romeo, who only ever seems to be mastered by his unchecked emotions and unrelenting fear of physical loneliness, Juliet ponders the situations in which she finds herself and thus appears infinitely more mature than her age and hastily conceived love would imply.

While standing on her balcony, thinking herself alone (though, in truth, Romeo is hiding in the bushes below and watching her), Juliet sublimely waxes philosophical as she contemplates names and their relationship to reality:

‘Tis but a name that is my enemy.
Thou [Romeo] art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And, for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself. (2.2.41-52)

Recognizing that her family is embattled in a feud against Romeo’s family, Juliet seems desperate to prove that Romeo himself has nothing to do with the violence. Using the metaphor of a rose’s disparity from its given name, she concludes that Romeo’s family name has nothing to do with his actions: being a Montague does not by itself preclude Romeo’s involvement in the bitter Montague-Capulet feud. In fact, Juliet is absolutely correct in this thinking, though there is no way for her to know this information, for Romeo reveals his impatience with the feud in Act 1, Scene 1, when he comes late upon the scene of the street brawl that opens the play:

O me! What fray was here?
Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all. (1.1.178-179)

Romeo, Juliet thinks, would retain his perfection even if he were called by any name other than “Montague”–a name that to her, a Capulet, should seem imperfect.

Notably, this ability to think through such a dilemma is completely alien to Romeo. Indeed, after he learns that Juliet belongs to the enemy family, he does not ponder the predicament but instead hastily tries to return to Capulet’s house by way of the garden, finding himself incapable of being separated from Juliet:

Can I go forward when my heart is here?
Turn back, dull earth, and find thy center out. (2.1.1-2)

Romeo’s fear of being physically alone overrides any amount of powerful, original thought he might otherwise have had. The only solution he can find to this problem is to return, as it were, to the scene of the crime.

Later in the play, after Romeo has murdered Tybalt, the Nurse, wracked with agony at the news, tries and fails to clearly relate the turn of events to Juliet; frustrated with the Nurse’s unintelligibility, she exclaims,

What devil art thou that dost torment me thus?
This torture should be roared in dismal hell.
Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but “Ay,”
And that bare vowel “I” shall poison more
Than the death-darting eye of the cockatrice.
I am not I if there be such an “I,”
Or those eyes shut that makes thee answer “Ay.”
If he be slain, say “Ay,” or if not, “No.”
Brief sounds determine my weal or woe. (3.2.49-57)

Even in the midst of her frustration, Juliet has the cognitive power to pull off a triple pun! But, as Northrop Frye has noted, “she’s not ‘playing’ with the words: she’s shredding them to bits in an agony of frustration and despair” (26). The “ay” – “I” – “eye” figure, then, is an example of Juliet’s authentic strength of mind, for even in a moment of crisis, her thinking far surpasses that of any other character in the play.

In the same scene as Juliet learns that her “three-hours” husband has murdered her cousin Tybalt, she thinks through the chaos and calamity of the situation to discover that fate has graced her with a rather positive outcome:

But wherefore, villain, didst thou kill my cousin?
That villain cousin would have killed my husband.
Back, foolish tears, back to your native spring;
Your tributary drops belong to woe,
Which you, mistaking, offer up to joy.
My husband lives, that Tybalt would have slain,
And Tybalt’s dead, that would have slain my husband.
All this is comfort. Wherefore weep I then? (3.2.110-118)

Though she moves from this into the notion that Romeo’s banishment is worse for her than death — or the deaths of “ten thousand Tybalts,”  or even the deaths of her mother, father, Tybalt, Romeo, and herself — one can hardly blame her for this hasty conclusion: for though she is married, she is still a 13-year-old girl living in a society which dictates that she cannot leave her father’s house without her parents’ permission. Romeo’s banishment, therefore, means that she will never be able to venture forth to visit him outside Verona’s walls; and this loss of love, especially in the context of the ideologies of Courtly Love that so permeate the play, is understandably equatable to death.

Romeo, on the other hand, is incapable of reaching Juliet’s conclusion in 3.2.115-116 on his own, and in fact requires Friar Lawrence to spell it out for him plainly:

Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slewest Tybalt: there art thou happy.
The law that threatened death becomes thy friend
And turns it to exile: there art thou happy. (3.3.147-150)

Indeed, despite the Friar’s flustered admonishments, Romeo does not so much as calm down until the “ghostly confessor” mentions that he should sneak into Juliet’s room to comfort her during this difficult time. Once again, it isn’t any amount of clear-headed reason that drives Romeo, but rather his overpowering fear of being physically alone, a fear that the Friar assures him still can be remedied by sneaking into Juliet’s room as previously planned.

The last half of the play finds Juliet the victim of circumstances from which no power of thought can save her: the stars have spoken, and the only power it seems she has it to commit suicide. (Not surprisingly, Juliet recognizes this fact at the very end of Act 3, Scene 5, when she declares, “If all else fail, myself have power to die” (3.5.255).) Her parents violently berate her because she refuses to marry Paris; the Nurse betrays her by advising her to forget Romeo and marry the count; Friar Lawrence victimizes her by way of his convoluted and unnecessary plot involving his “distilling liquor” — unnecessary, for what prevents him from merely secreting Juliet out of Verona to join her husband in Mantua? — and the friar mishandles her yet again when he abandons her in the Capulet crypt. All else does fail, and her only option at the end is suicide. Thus, Juliet’s death is the true tragedy in the play, for Romeo’s is the result of rash behavior: unlike Juliet, he does have options other than suicide. Had he, for instance, remained in Mantua but for a single day longer, he may have lived to see his young wife alive. But Juliet follows the only course left open to her, and in that course, Shakespeare’s first cognitively powerful character aspires immortality.

Works Cited

Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. New Haven, Yale UP, 1986.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Simon & Schuster, Updated ed., New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011.

 

The Queen Mab Speech: Mercutio’s Unwitting Prophecy

“She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes / In shape no bigger than an agate stone” (I.iv.59-60)

Mercutio’s famous Queen Mab speech (I.iv.58-100) has elicited many interpretations, such as the belief that the monologue demonstrates Mercutio’s genius at improvisation as well as the notion that it pinpoints Mercutio’s overt homoeroticism and possible homosexuality. While one (or both) of these characterizational interpretations may be true, there is another reading of the speech that works on a different, structural level: though he most certainly does not realize he does so, Mercutio uses the Queen Mab speech to symbolize the narrative structure of the play–a happy-go-lucky “good dream” that quickly turns into a dark, oppressive nightmare.

The monologue is induced when Romeo and Mercutio argue over the ostensible veracity of dreams:

Romeo. I dreamt a dream tonight.
Mercutio. And so did I.
Romeo. Well, what was yours?
Mercutio. That dreamers often lie.
Romeo. In bed asleep while they do dream things true.
Mercutio. O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you. (I.iv.53-58)

Romeo is apparently arguing that dreamers dream reflections of reality–if not reality itself. Mercutio, ever the realist, happily jumps on this opportunity to mock his sensitive, overly-imaginative friend. Rather than continuing the argument in any straightforward manner, he instead launches into a flamboyant speech about how dreams–granted by the fantastical fairy, Queen Mab–only reflect the desires of individuals, not reality:

Mercutio. And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lover’s brains, and then they dream of love;
On courtier’s knees, that dream on cur’sies straight;
O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream of fees;
O’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues
Because their breaths with sweemeats tainted are. (I.iv.75-81)

Lovers, for example, desire love and so dream of love; lawyers, by Mercutio’s same logic, desire money (“fees”) and so dream of money; and so on. Thus, Mercutio ruthlessly proves Romeo wrong: dreams are not real, but are instead mere reflections of our desires. Believing that dreams are true, he insinuates, is as foolish as believing in fairies.

But starting with line 80, Mercutio’s descriptions of dreams as being reflections of desire takes a darker turn: in an outright explicit turn of phrase, he indicates that Queen Mab often gets angered and “plagues” the lips of ladies with “blisters” (i.e., herpes) “[b]ecause their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are” (i.e., Mab infects ladies’ lips with herpes after she sees that they have been “tainted” by the act of oral sex). Certainly, this is not the stuff dreams are made on.

Darker still are Mercutio’s following descriptions of dreams: while still demonstrating that dreams only reflect desires, he says,

Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep, and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes
And, being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. (I.iv.87-93)

Truly, not all people are peaceful civilians, so not all dreams are placid. Soldiers, Mercutio says, desire killing enemy soldiers in battle, and thus their dreams are full of violence and death. At last, before being cut off by Romeo, Mercutio mentions that Queen Mab also brings to young girls dreams of the pain associated with both sex and childbirth. Obviously, dreams of sickness, death, and pain are quite different than the aforementioned dreams of love, money and kisses. Thus, dreams can be happy and frivolous, but dreams can also be dark and frightening.

Symbolically, this speech on the nature of dreams parallels the narrative structure of the play: at first, we have a happy, frivolous love story. Romeo and Juliet, it seems, will get married and live happily ever after once they reconcile their families with their love. But then Act III arrives, and Mercutio is pronounced dead by line 120 of the first scene, soon followed by Tybalt less than 20 lines later. To make matters worse, the Prince exiles Romeo at the end of the scene, a decree that ultimately leads to the miscommunication that results in the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. Thus, much like Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, the frivolity of the first half of the play quickly dissolves into nightmarish violence. Though he does not realize that he does so, Mercutio outlines the structure of the entire play with his speech, demonstrating that while he is speaking of dreams, he is most certainly not talking of “nothing”.

Reading Update: ‘Nothing Like the Sun’: 1592-1599: Chapters III-Epilogue

I read the second half of the book in close succession, having been entranced by Burgess’s language as one transfixed by a spell. The plot is not surprising, though it is magical observing the conception and execution of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, the Henry IV plays, Henry V, and the better part of the sonnets. Most poignant, however, is the scene in which WS, making a rare visit home, tells his son Hamnet a story:

“Tell me a story and let me be in the story.”

WS smiled. “Well, once there was a king and he had a son and the son’s name was Hamnet.’ He thought of Kyd’s crude play; strange, this matter of the name. And of dead Lord Strange with his north-country voice: “I’ll play Amloth with thee, lad!” Meaning that he would go into a rage (it was with a servant, not a player) like the hero they half-remembered in Yorkshire from the old days of Danish rule, only his rage had been a feigned madness to discover who had killed — “And the king’s father died but his ghost came back to tell the prince that he had not truly died but had been murdered. And the man that had murdered him was his own brother, the uncle of Hamnet.” (121)

Not fifty pages later, Hamnet has died and not further beyond that, WS returns home unannounced to find Anne incestuously in bed with his brother, Dickon. Art imitating life imitating art: there is, perhaps, more than the Danish historical truth of Prince Amloth’s sordid tale in Hamlet.

This is not to say that WS is a blameless cuckold; indeed, he voraciously consummates his affair with Harry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton (“Mr. WH,” putting his family name before his given name as he’s always told), “wrestling” playfully and otherwise maintaining a quasi-sado-masochistic relationship:

[H]e thrust his arms in a tight hug round the slim boy’s calves. Harry’s voice, high up there, screamed. Then WS brought him down, not hard on that deep pile showing embroidered green wantonness, his arms striving too late for balance, laughing, breathless. “Now,” went WS in mock gruffness, “I have thee.” They fought, and the craftsman’s arms were the stronger. (110)

And then, in the autumn of 1594, she arrives:

It was while he was walking off Bishopsgate — Houndsditch, Camomile Street, St Helen’s Place St Helen’s Church — that he saw her. She stepped from her own coach outside a house near St Helen’s, veiled, escorted by her unveiled maid. But, in the fresh fall wind, her veil lifted an instant; he saw. He saw a face the sun had blessed to gold. Another autumn, that autumn in Bristol, returned to him in a gust of shame. Beaten out of a black croshabell’s brothel for want of a little tinkling silver. It was different now. But this woman was, he thought, no tib, no purveyor of holy mutton. (137-138)

Asking around, WS eventually hears from Richard Burbage — who has a strangely intimate knowledge of the Dark Lady’s background — that she goes by the “Christian nickname” Lucy in England, though her real name is “some foreign or paynim name, a Mahometan one” (139) — Fatimah, we come to learn. WS rouses the gumption to follow her to her house, where he forgoes his former shame and strikes up a seemingly platonic relationship with her; but he soon steps outside the bounds of the Friend-Zone, as he himself narrates in a section of the novel that appears to be selections from his diary:

— Do you kiss in your country?

— We kiss not as you do. We have what is called de chium. It is done wid de nose.

— Show me.

— Nay, dat I may not.

— I beseech you.

She shyly places her delicate splay-nose on my left cheek and ploughs up once and down once, as she were new-making the furrow  already there.

— Ah, that is good, but an English kiss is better.

So saying, I seize her in mine arms and place my lips on hers. It is like no English kiss I have ever known: her lips are neither a rosebud nor a thin predatory line; they are full and fleshy, like some strange fruit or flower of her Indies. Her teeth are well forward, set like a palisade to forbid the melting of a close kiss. I bring my mouth away from hers and set it to kissing the cool-warm smoothness of her shoulder. But she will have none of this and yet she will; she pushes and pulls me toward-away from her. So now it is to me to say:

— I love thee, by God I do. My love my love I love thee.

— I love not dee.

And then she thrusts me away with more power and strength than I had thought possible to reside in such slenderness. But now I am whetted and will not desist. I clasp her and she batters me with little golden fists, crying at me in her own tongue. She cannot prevail and so she bites toward me, her tiny white teeth snapping at the air. So it is needful that I bear down upon her, drawing, as it were, the teeth of her biting in a great disabling kiss, the while I hold her to me as I would engraft her on to my body. And so soon she yields.

Soon? Very soon. I see soon that she knows all. She is no tyro in this game. I feel that disappointment that all men know when they discover they are not the first, and disappointment makes a kind of anger which makes a kind of savagery. But I possess her in a terrible joy, the appetite growing with the act of feeding, which astonishes me. And in the end I coldly see that I have a mistress. And a very rare one. (149-150)

After all this time, since his boyhood fantasies, WS has at last possessed his goddess. Or has he? There is still the trouble of their past, of her beating him out of the Bristol brothel when he was “want of a little tinkling silver;” and then, too, there is the strangeness of Burbage’s knowledge of her. WS sees his relationship to this Dark Lady as one in which he dominates, but like a clueless trick, he thoughtlessly gives her gold: “WS, prospering man of affairs, gives gold. Prices are so high, she says. It is on account of the crops failing last year” (151). And what is worse, she heatedly clambers for an introduction to WH, and when she at last receives one, Southampton, too, is intoxicated:

He then, as she were a Bart Fair show like a pig-headed child, praises her strangeness, her colour, her littleness. Oh bring her over, he says, we must exhibit her, my friends will be much taken. And all the time she quaffs him and, when he is gone, will not do what she is rightly come to do (or have done) but talks of his clothes and his deadgold swordhilt and his quicksilver words, Mercurio. He is gone now for his plump prostitute boy, I roughly tell her. Oh, dat believe I not, she answers, he is much a gentleman for de ladies; date see I bwery clear. (153)

[I marked the word WHORE in thick capital letters more than a few times throughout the margins of this section.]

WS at last comes to his senses about the Dark Lady/Lucy/Fatimah when WH indicates he has seen her in a carriage with none other than Richard Burbage. He does not in the end blame Burbage, though his temporary rage at his fellow actor causes him to forget his lines as Antonio in his own Two Gentlemen of Verona, to the amusement and mockery of the audience. Perhaps it is the Dark Lady’s hasty though inevitable dalliance with his own bed-companion WH that allows WS to forgive Burbage. Regardless, his fear of supposed cuckoldry by his dark mistress provides an uncomfortably ironic contrast to the genuine, though as-yet-unseen, cuckoldry by his wife.

Despite WS’s inability to see so, the Dark Lady remains still a prostitute, or at least continues to function as one, and WH remains his friend, more platonic than sexual at this point. One charming section of the novel finds WS and WH, having both lost the Dark Lady, rekindling their friendship as Southampton recovers from an as-yet-unidentified illness. They discuss the twenty new sonnets WS has written for his friend, but their amiable conversation inevitably turns to their mutual “dark little doxy,” or “heterodoxy,” as WH quips:

“Where is she now?”

“She wished to be a fine lady. She had, would you believe it, ambitions to marry into the English nobility, that black creature. And she comes crying to me that she is with child.”

“With child? Your child?”

“Who knows whose child? Mine. Yours. Anybody’s. It might well be yours from the time of her having it, if my calculating is correct. Though there are untimely births. But let’s talk of other things, not drabs and their brats.”

“I must know this,” said WS. “What happened?”

Harry yawned. “That wind blowing in makes me sleepy.” WS did not get up from the chair where he was sitting to close the window. “Oh well, I see you are concerned. That I did not expect. I have heard all sorts of tales about her since, chiefly that her house and coach and servants were all paid for in Spanish gold and that her aim was to reach me through you –”

“I did all the wooing there.”

“Wait. And to reach Robin Devereux through myself and slay him. And even to slay other great ministers of state and then, when apprehended, plead her belly.” (181)

Pregnant? Involved in a Spanish conspiracy against English heads of state? Perhaps, but WS cares for only one of these rumors: another Shakespeare child? Another son, even? As it turns out, yes, another son; but this tidbit comes from the Dark Lady, so the veracity of the information remains in doubt; but as far as WS is concerned, it is true, and the boy’s mother has sent the child to live with relatives back East. “The male line died in the West,” WS tells us in the novel’s epilogue; “It was right it should continue in the East” (234).

***

Though any tale of Shakespeare’s life is intriguing — for indeed, the scarce facts leave us with scant but our imaginations — in the end, Burgess’s “WS” is another shade of Joyce’s Poldy Bloom. He might be a playwright — the playwright — instead of an advertising agent, but WS is inward, sensitive, and imaginative; he is man who cannot hold his liquor, a father grieving over a dead son, and, of course, he is a cuckold. Perhaps this was Burgess’s intention, however: Shakespeare could do worse than be represented by the personality of the most likable character in all of Western literature.

Burgess’s true original strengths in Nothing Like the Sun lie in the mesmerizing language and the vivid evocation of the Elizabethan time-period. Whether in a backwater village or in the metropolitan streets of London, there is no doubt that this is Shakespeare’s England. In addition to the illustrations of the plague-stricken English, of street brawls and court intrigue, there are enthralling depictions of the public’s enthusiasm for everyday sadism and gore. Take, for example, this passage, in which WS has been dragged unwillingly to the public execution of three men accused of conspiring against the Crown:

This is Noko. What is his name? Noko, no, Tinoco. A foreign and heathen name. He is to be first. And now this Tinoco, a dark and shivering man in a white shirt, had his shirt stripped from him as he was roughly untied from the hurdle. The hangman presented the knife, new-sharpened, new-polished, to the sun; the mob went aaaaaaaah. Called the hangman, it was yet not his office to fix the long thin neck into the halter; the first assistant must do that. Tinoco, stumbling, falling with fear, and all to the crowd’s laughter, was made to mount the ladder, rung by slow trembling rung. Behind him, behind the gallows itself, the hanger waited on a narrow crude podium, a platform mounted on a platform. He was a young man, muscular; his mouth opened in some ribald pleasantry to his victim as he secured the hempen noose about his neck. And then WS could see the lips of the victim moving, as in prayer; the trembling hands sought to join in prayer, but could not. Of a sudden the noose was tightened; over the momentary inbreathed silence of the crowd the choking desperation of the hanged could clearly be heard. The second assistant pulled the ladder away sharply. The legs dangled a second but the staring eyes still blinked. Here was art, far more exact than WS’s own: the hangman approached with his knife, fire in the sunlight, before the neck could crack, ripped downwards from heart to groin in one slash, swiftly changed knife from right to left, then plunged a mottled fist inside the swinging body. The first assistant took the bloody knife from his master and wiped it with care on a clean cloth, the while he eyes were on the artistry of the drawing. The right hand withdrew, dripping, holding up for all to see a heart in its fatty wrappings; then the left arm plunged to reappear all coiled and clotted with entrails. The crowd cheered; the girl in front of WS leaped and clapped; a child on his father’s shoulder thumb-sucked, indifferent, understanding nothing of all this, the adult world. Blood poured and spurted richly, the sumptuousness of heraldic bearings, glinting as the sun struck. And then (for the rope must be used again) the noose was loosened, the ruined body upheld while blood poured still, the tautness of the rope made slack again. The hangman threw the heart and guts into the steaming bowl, freeing his arms from the incrustations with quick fingers, drying them then, unwashed, on a towel. The crowd moaned its pleasure, its continued excitement, for were there not two more victims to come? The hangman was handed a hatchet, squat and dull compared with that quick artist’s instrument but sharp as it cracked through bone for the quartering — the head, the limbs. A gaping torso was upheld a moment, then all these pieces of man were thrown into a basket. (128-130)

Horrifying, but enthralling; and yet, the whole scene is accurate, right down to the heart and entrails tossed in a bowl. Burgess tricks us here, however, for while we think we should identify with WS, whose shock and numbness at the spectacle reveals a transcendence from the cultural norm, the language describing the violence draws us in and fascinates us to the point where we identify with the “aaaaaaaah”-ing audience and are thus complicit with the hangman and his goons. So absorbing is Burgess’s evocation of the period that he transforms us, the readers, into Elizabethans — sadism and all.

The execution scene makes us Elizabethans, but it ends by making us feel uncomfortable about it. Dr Roderigo Lopez, “Jew, Machiavel, small and black” (130) is the third and last here to be executed:

Let him not be granted the least dignity in his dying: strip all off. There is a fair-sized thursday for thee; mark, he is like all foreigners for the appurtenances for lust. Lopez prayed aloud in a high screaming voice, in an outlandish tongue, his own. No, it is to the Devil he prayeth, for is not Adonai the foreign name of the Devil? And then, in ridiculous foreigner’s English:

“I love de Kvin. Ass mosh ass I loff Zhessoss Krist — “

The crowd split their sides with laughter but were, at the same time, most indignant: this naked foreign monkey praying, saying the Holy Name in his nakedness, screaming with that smart filthy rod, of his love for the Queen. Despatch, but not too slowly. And then, in articulo mortis, his body spurted, but not with blood. Parents, shocked, covered the eyes of their children. Draw, draw, draw. The hangman’s hands reeked. Then he went with his hatchet for the body  as he would mince it fine. (130-131)

The crowd cheers the unnatural tearing of a man’s hearts from his chest, but they cannot abide the natural release of excrement upon his death. But we are the Elizabethan crowd as we read, and we marvel at this spectacle as we do at the previous two; and yet, there is the discomfort we feel at Lopez’s praying “aloud in a high screaming voice, in an outlandish tongue, his own,” and the pain at hearing his “foreigner’s English”: this is an ambiguous pain that plays out clearly at the end of Merchant of Venice, as Shylock numbly renounces his Jewish faith. Burgess was keen to place WS in an equitable state of numbness upon witnessing this scene: Lopez is Shylock, and WS is the quiet voice of the ambiguous discomfort. This voice was not heard as loudly as others in Elizabeth’s England, but it was as much of a reality as anything else that Burgess so vividly evokes.

***

And so, Burgess concludes: WS is the author of several popular plays, though his most important is yet to come, which will showcase an unprecedented personage who bears a name similar to his late son’s; Lucy Negro/Fatimah has bore a dark-skinned Shakespeare son and sent him off to the East, where the Shakespeare line shall continue; the spring of WS’s relationship with WH has resolved into its inevitable decay, as Southampton has insulted WS too close to the bone through mockery of his cuckoldry via his brother; and WS, now an honest gentleman with a coat-of-arms to prove it, is decaying bodily with syphilis.

In the oneiric epilogue, which seems to be WS speaking hazily at the close of his life many years after the narrative proper’s ending in 1599, he sees his body as analogous to London: “In my delirium the City was mine own body — fighting broke out in ulcers on left thigh, both armpits, in the spongy and corrupt groin” (228). Decaying WS is the decaying City, Eliot’s “unreal city.” And as he’s dying, his morally righteous son-in-law, the good doctor John Hall, gives his own critical view of WS’s body of work:

— His plays were first all flowers and love and sweet laughter or else the stirring true record of England’s progress towards order. Then he brooded on what he called evil, aye.

— Evil? Wrongs, that is?

— Nay, not wrongs, for wrongs, he said, were man-made and might be redressed. But he thought that the great white body of the world was set upon by an illness from beyond, gratuitous and incurable. And that even the name Love was, far from being the best invocation against it, often the very conjuration that summoned the mining and ulcerating hordes. We are, he seemed to say, poisoned at the source. (231)

And this seems to be what Burgess proves through his narrative time and again, through the loves and lusts, the desperation and the ecstasy, the madness and the violence: we are poisoned at the source.

But O! what sweet poison!

“What’s here? A cup closed in my true love’s hand?
Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end.
O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after. I will kiss thy lips.
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them,
To make me die with a restorative. (Romeo and Juliet, 5.3.167-171)

Reading Update: ‘Nothing Like the Sun’: 1592-1599: Chapters I-II

Burgess decides to pass over the most historically ambiguous time in Shakespeare’s life (between his leaving Stratford and his early fame as a mediocre playwright for Philip Henslowe’s playhouse, the Rose; i.e., 1587-1592), and he instead commences the novel’s second section a full five years after WS’s decision to take his “pseudo-Plautus” (an early draft of The Comedy of Errors) to the Queen’s Players and try his skill in drama-craft.

Chapter I of this new section is rife with delightful depictions of various facets of life in Elizabethan England. Not only do we get splendid caricatures of Elizabethans famously connected to Shakespeare, such as Will Kemp, Ned Alleyn, and of course Henslowe, but we also get a clear vision of day-to-day life: a riot breaks out, a “riot for riot’s sake” (81), suspiciously reminiscent of the street brawl at the start of Romeo & Juliet, and it is viciously beaten down by the brutal Marshal’s Men and ended by the Lord Mayor, a fitting image of Verona’s Prince Escalus); Henslowe anticipates the closure of the playhouses due to a combination of the civil insanity of the Midsummer season and the infectiousness of the plague-season; and then there’s this gem:

The city baked in its corruption; flies crawled over the sleeping lips of a child; the rats twitched their whiskers at an old dead woman (shrunk to five stone) that lay among lice in a heap of rancid rags; the bells tolled all day for the plague-stricken; cold ale tasted as warm as a posset; the flesher shooed flies off with both hands before chopping his stinking beef; heaps of shit festered and heaved in the heat; tattered villains broke into houses where man, woman, child lay panting and calling feebly for water and, mocking their distress, stole what they had a mind to; the city grew a head, glowing over limbs of towers and houses in the rat-scurrying night, and its face was drawn, its eyes sunken, it vomited foul living matter down to ooze over the cobbles, in its delirium it cried Jesus Jesus. (85-86)

So impressive is this description of plague-stricken Elizabethan England that I have a mind to share this with my students from now on as we start our Shakespeare unit. How can one not dry-heave  at this rank illustration and yet dazzle at the breathtaking language?

***

But Burgess does not abandon the story for these impressive historical anecdotes. We also see WS beginning to write Richard III alongside his long poem, Venus and Adonis. Particularly splendid is the moment in which we see WS writing the dedication for the latter piece, a scene that juxtaposes the words in the writer’s head with the sights and sounds of the Elizabethan world around him:

“I know not how I shall offend…” Spring waking in London, crude crosses still on the doors, but the wind blowing in the smell of grass and the ram-bell’s tinkle. Piemen and flower-sellers cried. “…in dedicating my lines, no, my unpolished lines, to your lordship…” From a barber-shop came the tuning of a lute and then the aching sweetness of treble song. “…nor how the world will rebuke, no, censure me for choosing so strong a prop…” There were manacled corpses in the Thames, that three tides had washed. “…to support so weak a burden…” A kite overhead dropped a gobbet of human flesh. “…only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised…” In a smoky tavern a bawdy catch was flung at the foul air. “…and vow to take advantage of all idle hours…” Pickpurses strolled among the gawping country cousins. “…till I have honoured you with some grave labour…” A limping child with a pig’s head leered out from an alleyway. “…But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed…” A couple of Paul’s men swaggered by, going haw haw haw. “…I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather…” Stale herrings smelled to heaven in a fishman’s basket. “…and never after ear so barren a land…” A cart lurched, rounding a corner; wood splintered against stone. “…for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest…”The sun, in sudden great glory, illumined white towers. “…I leave it to your honourable survey…” A thin girl in rags begged, whining. “…and your honour to your heart’s content…” An old soldier with one eye munched bread in a dark passage. “…which I wish may always answer your own wish…” Skulls on Temple Bar. “…and the world’s hopeful expectation.” A distant consort of brass — cornets and sackbuts. “Your honour’s in all duty…” A drayhorse farted. “…WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.” (97-98)

This inside-outside view of WS’s thinking and perception registers as my favorite section of the text so far. It seems at first that the depictions of Elizabethan England will be more of the same from earlier — merchants sellings their wares, birds dropping bits of human flesh, corpses floating in the river, dirty and dangerous London in general — but then we have the brilliant close, where we hear a flourish of trumpets as WS concludes the dedication, edging towards his name; and when  at last he writes it, a horse farts. A magnificent marriage of complex literary technique and low-brow humor. WS would certainly approve.

Venus and Adonis is brought to the forefront because the playhouses have inevitably closed down due to the plague; as WS says to a temporarily jobless Ned Alleyn, “Richard can wait” (99). Enter Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. Introduced to WS by the rather libertine Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, “Master HW, or, putting his family first as he is told he must, Master WH” (91) immediately catches the eye of young poet with his “dark excitement”:

He was young, hardly older than the two bobbed pages who, unawed, played a game of treading on each other’s toes and giggling. Eighteen? Nineteen? He had a red pouting mouth and very white skin; his golden beard was sparse. There was something in his eyes that WS did not like — a slyness, an unwillingness to look boldly. But he was beautiful enough, there was no doubt of his beauty. (91)

Before this first meeting concludes, WS, “suddenly dilirious with an idea [as he looks]  down bashfully on this young nobleman who sprawled so carelessly, bored, pouting” (93), petitions WH to accept the dedication to him of Venus and Adonis. Florio, the young Earl’s Italian confidant and apparent bodyguard, does not object, and WH accepts. But WS’s mind has drifted from the poem into the regions of his long-suppressed, if occasionally troublesome, dark excitement:

[He] looked down bitterly on this Adonis, so languid, so satiated of all his world give. He saw himself taking him and stripping him of his silk and jewels and then beating him till he cried. I will raise great weals on thy tender delicate skin, puppy. (94)

This time, at least, the object that incites his dark excitement is of-age.

 ***

Chapter II finds WS completing Venus and Adonis, including the dedication, whose inception is described in the brilliant passage above, and discovering that WH is “altogether ravished by it” (103). Florio, young Southampton’s “gatekeeper,” as it were, is a bit more suspicious: he says to WS quite unabashedly, “I saw in your eyes that day of our first meeting what you might do” (102). So, rather than allow WS to become a short-lived toy for WH, Florio suggests something a bit more useful and socially acceptable: that the poet compose a series of verses — what will culminate in the “Fair Youth” sonnets — on the theme of marriage. “It can be made a commission,” Florio declares; “His mother would be glad to throw gold at you” (103). Marriage, the Italian feels, would protect HW from the “corruptive forces at court” who would “lay themselves on [HW’s] beauty.”

But this talk of marriage cannot exorcise homosexual thoughts from WS’s mind — for indeed, we must not forget that he, too, is married at this time. He enters the great Southampton home and finds something he did not expect: the real-life incarnation of his golden goddess’s bedchamber:

He remembered his boyhood’s vision, the gold goddess, the arms that implored. But here was no goddess; that premonition had been false. In a bed of gold that seemed to float like a ship on a carpet that was all tritons and nerids, Master WH lay on satin  cusions. (103-104).

Though this fertile period of Shakespeare’s love-life will undoubtedly yield the first of the sonnets, it will also be the period in which WS explores his sexuality and, without a doubt, designates Master WH as the end-point to this expedition.

Reading Update: ‘Nothing Like the Sun’: 157?-1587: Chapters IX-X

Sin, humiliation, population, desolation.

WS, heartbroken after the rebuff from his prostitute-Goddess and panicking at the loss of the Plautus books, sets out to write his own “Englished” version of Plautus’s Menaechmi, taking pains to retain the supposed translative voices of the Quedgeley boys. But disaster strikes when, in the midst of a lesson on why boys portray women in contemporary plays, WS’s “dark excitement” (eg., his repressed homosexual urges) overcome the laws of his superego, and he slips into a lesson about how the ancients saw sex with a woman as merely the means of reproduction, whereas “A sweet and lovely boy was all the desire of [the] bearded men” (62). Indeed, WS’s unconscious urgings even lead him as far as to tell the boys that “There are those who say…that [Jesus Christ] did practice this sort of love with His beloved disciple John.” To be sure, his superego rails at him for this talk:

What was this? Why had he said that? Was it nerves struck to jangling by frustration? Had his inner being revolted against women — white and nagging, black and punching? (62-63)

At least one of the boys is entranced by this blatant talk if homosexuality: Miles, twin brother to Ralph. As it happened, Ralph had a toothache that kept him howling at night, so Miles uses this as an excuse to ask WS — his tutor — to allow him entrance to his bed. We are not told what, if anything, occurs, but after Ralph’s tooth is drawn, “Miles came no more to the bed of WS, but he simpered in his presence like some girl, taunting and teasing” (63). And then disaster strikes:

[O]ne day WS seized him when he came, first and alone, to the lesson-room, but, God forgive him, it was not Miles he seized but Ralph. Ralph screamed worse than for the toothache. His father and mother ran in, both open parent mouths showing breakfast bread chewed but yet unswallowed. There were loud words; there were very nearly blows. WS, though, thrust out the quill-knife in defence. Mistress Quedgeley cried:

“He will murder us. I always knew this would happen. Villains picked up in outlandish parts.”

“Hold thy tongue, woman,” boomed her lord. “For you, sirrah, out of this house instanter. Filth and corruption of the young and innocent. Out.” (64)

WS tries vainly to protest, but is booted from the Quedgeley’s. He grumbles about revenge, briefly falls incahoots with a conman with rigged dice, but eventually returns to Stratford, where he professes returning due to loneliness for his family. (Could even they believe it?)

It’s important to note that during this return journey from the Quedgeley’s, plays and players are on his mind. He has his “pseudo-Plautus” with him (his translation of the Menaechmi), and when he meets a group of players at Evesham, he sees them “with a new eye” (66). And later, as he leaves the players, he muses, “The Inns of Court and the courts of inns; was there not perhaps some decent middle way, where poesy might be shouted at the world like truth itself?” Clearly, his playwrighting craft is coming to form.

[Also worth noting: approaching Temple Grafton, he hears a “devil-raven” croaking “Anne Anne Anne Anne,” and it seems to him a “harbinger” (67). Perhaps this is an indication that Anne will be his death, or at least there when he dies?]

Chapter X finds WS taking up work as a clerk, where he learns that “Words, pretenses, fictions. They ruled” (67). He also discovers the bawdry of Rabelais via his new boss. “‘This is all for your education, young man,” his boss proclaims.

Anne, having grown pregnant again, delivers twins: WS is thrilled that at least one of them is a boy. Following a talk with his Bible-story-thumping brother Gilbert, WS decides to name the children after the initials of Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, a notion inspired by the deluge of rain pouring down at the twins’ birth. They have already “S” Susanna; “J” becomes Judith, and the son, “H,” becomes Hamnet — a popular boy’s name in the Midlands of Elizabethan England.

One night, when the overwet weather has resolved to an overhot draught, WS and Anne are sitting naked by an open window, she reading and he contemplating how he is now long past sin. (Has it really been that long since the Quedgeley disaster?) Through the open window, they hear a hullabaloo and look out to see a mob chasing down Old Madge, who formerly prophesied to a younger WS that he should catch a “black woman or a golden man” (15). “Witch! Bring the rain back!” cries one of the mobbing party; but WS observes Anne’s sadistic pleasure at viewing the spectacle:

“Now,” said Anne, panting. “Now at the window.” WS looked at her, sick, incredulous. “Now, now, oh, quickly!” He shrank away from her, into the room’s shadows.

“No!” Here was the witch, here. (74)

She has no pity — with which WS is oversupplied — and this horrifies him. And, not surprisingly, he resolves to leave again, this time with the Queen’s Players, who have just stopped by Stratford on their tour. He will offer them his pseudo-Plautus (clearly a draft of his Comedy of Errors), and if that fails, he will attempt to act. Indeed, he muses, “the time is come for acting, no longer lying passive to wait on destiny to deal” (75).

And so, he looks at Anne, asleep now that the excitement of Madge’s mobbing has passed, and “[s]inking gently to that simulacrum in his skull of the dark world that lay beyond, out, he became Endymion” — that is, the lover of the Moon. Consider the ties here to Sonnet 130: “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun…” He will be alone, with only the Moon as his companion.

At least for now.

Reading Update: ‘Nothing Like the Sun’, 157?-1587: Chapter VIII

After a mere 54 pages, WS meets his dark Goddess: a Bristol prostitute.

Teaching the Quedgeley boys is a hopeless task. They are too much the rambunctious adolescents, goofing around, mocking the divine material (here, Ovid and the Latin language in general) and otherwise condescending to their instructor. WS threatens beating but the boys only laugh at his mentioning of smacking bare buttocks with a stick (55).

Nevertheless, Mr. Quedgeley — “no longer the jolly unbuttoned fellow that had cidered it to insensibility in Ettington but a grave man, much the magistrate, in black” (54) — wants his boys to see a Plautus play enacted, but first to “English” the various parts themselves to become better acquainted with the source material. And so he sets WS off to Bristol with money for copies of the play for teacher and pupils.

After purchasing the books from a speech-impedimented bookseller named Cunliffe, WS hears, from “the back streets that were like serpents or twisted veins” (57), a voice calling, “What cheer, bully! Dost thou seek a bert?” WS’s heart “near faint[s],” for the voice belongs to a woman, whom the narration thus describes:

If Englishman were white…then she must be called black; but black she could not in truth be called, rather gold, but then not gold, nor royal purple neither, for when we say colours we see a flatness, as of cloth, but here was flesh that moved and swam on the light’s tide, ever changing in hue but always of a richness that could only be termed royal; her colour was royalty. For her hair, it coiled in true blackness; her lips were thick; her nose was not tightened against the cold air, like an English nose, an Anne nose, nor pinched at the meagreness of the sun, but flat and wide; her brow was wide too, though shallow. And so she stood, smiling at him and beckoning with her long golden finger. (57-58)

[Such divine language! Worthy of Joyce, if not of WS himself. And note the affinities between the description above and Sonnet 130.]

But alas! WS has only enough money for a meager dinner at a hole-in-the-wall ordinary, and she — his Goddess, to the last (cf. the description above with his earlier erotic vision on p.9) — is a prostitute, however exotic she may otherwise be. He halfheartedly expresses his penury by showing an opened palm, which the Goddess-prostitute clearly misunderstands, for she leads him into a whorehouse, past other practitioners d’amour and their clients and into a room of their own. WS momentarily feels guilt for the prospects of the affair, but then drops the Plautus books he just bought and

“embraced her golden body trembling. She said naught, he kissed what words she would utter fiercely back into her mouth and, in that soft strange contact, felt as if he were starting some strange [voyage] to lands of men with dog-heads or plate-feet, carbuncles and diamonds to be raked from under the golden-egg palms. Rocks, the oven-sun, fish that talked, the toothed waves. Then she drew herself away brusquely and held out her hand for money. (59)

Breathlessly exotic — his dreams almost realized — and then a stark “Payment up front, please.”

WS, having no payment to give up front, finally makes his penury clear, after which the Goddess ceases to be exotic and becomes all too Anne: she beats him for leading her on so, and in fact the Madam of the house — just as “black,” or Indian, as the Goddess — joins in on the beating.

WS leaves with his face in-tact, but alas! as he looks back at Bristol en route to the Quedgeleys’, he sees not only shame and humiliation, but also the Plautus books that he’d dropped in an amorous stupor on the whorehouse floor.

So close to happiness and dream-realization, and then rejection and disappointment. As WS himself says, “till action, lust is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust.”Methinks, however, that his encounters with the Goddess are not completed. This is only up to p.60 after all.

Reading Update: ‘Nothing Like the Sun’, 157?-1587: Chapters IV-VII

Chapters IV-VII move quickly despite the great many events that occur: after seeing a girl he fancies with another man, WS gets drunk in an alehouse, gets punched in the stomach, vomits, and passes out; he wakes up in a wooded area next to a half-nude woman [later revealed to be Anne Hathaway, future Mrs. Shakespeare], and they proceed to do what comes naturally in such a situation, mostly because WS cannot remember who she is and, being a sensy through and through, he doesn’t want to hurt her feelings by making this known. (Not that there is much reason for him to protest in said predicament.)

Nevertheless WS wants to forget this woman, and he begins to court another, younger girl named Anne (this one with black hair — typical WS, what with his earlier fantasies of his dark-haired, dark-skinned goddess), but he is eventually violently informed by two men of the Hathaway clan that the older Anne is with-child and that it’s time for young Master Shakespeare to do the honorable thing. He doesn’t want to marry her, but he has little choice. Plus, being a sensy, he surely would die of guilt were he to leave older Anne and baby high and dry.

Married life is strenuous for WS, though mainly because of his husbandly duties to sate his new wife’s lawful matrimonial pleasures. Anne Hathaway, it turns out [in this tale, at least] is one kinky dame! Role-playing, violence, props — the list of her fetishes goes on, and poor WS can hardly keep up, forcing himself forward only as she berates his masculinity. (Perhaps this is the “hell” he alludes to at the close of Sonnet 129?)

He finally realizes the possibility that the new baby, Susanna, might not be his, and so he devises an excuse to depart from Anne: he will need to leave home to seek out greater income elsewhere. (Perhaps true, perhaps not.) But something causes him to delay; he muses this something might be Susanna, his poor maybe-daughter, for whom he feels affection and, of course, his trademark pity.

In the midst of a glove-making deal (making a single glove), WS meets John Quedgeley, who eventually gets the apprentice glove-maker drunk on hard cider at the delivery of the glove in question. After slithering home and sleeping off his cider-drunkenness, he is informed by his brother (who had to deliver the glove that WS forgot to bring the first time) that Mister Quedgeley will be by the following morning to pick him up to begin his new post as live-in teacher for the Quedgeley kids. Just as with his first meeting with Anne, drunkenness has prevented him from having any recollection of this.

It’s interesting that Burgess leaves even WS in the dark about some important aspects of his life: we know so little about it, so why shouldn’t he himself, too? How he met Anne, how he got out of glove-making–of what other important life events will WS be as clueless as us? Why he goes to London? How he gets into acting? Why he stays married to Anne until death, despite the lack of love? Why he retires early? How he dies?! I cannot wait to find out.