Sunday, May 29, 2016

Commonplace Book

'"...whoever accepts the duties that await him subjects his feet to chains and his heart to bitter trials. It remains to consider whether the man who has found himself confronted by duty at the moment of his greatest strength, and has turned aside to avoid it, can still be happy in his heedlessness and say that he is content with himself."'

from The Snow Man by George Sand (Chapter XX)

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Commonplace Book

'"She is so young," says Frederic, deprecatingly. "I should hope that one might be able to mould her ---"

"Mould her!" echoes Paul, derisively. "My dear boy, it would take you all your time. She would comb your hair with a three-legged stool."'

from "Good-bye, Sweetheart!" by Rhoda Broughton (Part I, Chapter X)

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Yellow Man by Shusaku Endo (1955)

This is a novella ensconced in the grim enervation of a country nearing its defeat in war. Japan is very short on food in 1945. There is an air of gloomy suspicion everywhere, and an attitude of bitten desperation as people starve and bombing raids increase. This piece is set in a provincial area nearby to an aircraft factory, so the sense of being a target is magnified. Two French Catholic missionary priests have been resident there since the early thirties; a church has been built and a small congregation gathered. The story is related in flashbacks taken from a diary of one of the priests, and from a letter from an uncertain young convert by the name of Chiba. These pieces relate how one of them came to an unexpected disgrace through his lust for an abandoned young woman who was somewhat shunned by society. His initial motive had been to help her but, in common with many of the motivations expressed by the characters here, he seems to suffer a kind of apathetical malaise and stumble on into a lowering fate. It is this fate which seems to be Endo's subject, or more particularly the fact that while the whites see it as 'God's will' and tussle with it endlessly, the Japanese, even the converted ones, cannot quite escape their cultural heritage of seeing it calmly as just the way things are, 'neither judgment nor punishment', and not to be fought. Interestingly, Endo attempts a white view of the Japanese by quite clearly labelling their responses to fate as enigmatic. The story in flashback moves on into the war period with the disgraced priest, Durand, grudgingly allowed to sit behind the door of the church during services. It is noticed that he is ill - consumption has begun its grip on him. Privation begins, and his former missionary partner, Breau, still in office but regarded suspiciously as an enemy alien, occasionally slips him a little money for food. Breau has a gun from his old days in Indochina which he leaves with Durand - private guns are prohibited for enemy aliens, and Breau has leverage over Durand through the help he is giving him. There is a moot point here as to whether Breau intends that Durand may want to use it on himself if his illness gets too bad, or if Breau himself, his lifeline in some ways, is killed or removed. Durand grows steadily weaker, his morality more and more morassed, the surveillance of them both by military police becoming more and more obvious, until the scale tips and fear takes over. Durand breaks into Breau's house and hides the gun clumsily behind some items in a cupboard in his study. In their last meeting Breau makes it obvious to Durand that he knows what he has done, and forgives him as their religion decrees. The police arrive and Breau is taken away. Chiba, the yellow man of the title, ill himself and in a very drab state, meditates over the tragedy of both these white men in a detailed, seared examination of the variance of attitude between the priests and the Japanese, and comes to the conclusion that he can at least see the selfishness and struggle of Durand as understandable, while the 'pure white world' of Breau is supremely distant. The last act is set up with Chiba and his married lover Itoko having a grim liaison in the shack of an old family retainer, making love blindly thinking of Father Breau's arrest. Afterward, he sees someone who looks like Durand behind the hedge, throwing a tiny package into the yard. It is the diary which recounts this story, and which we learnt at the very beginning Chiba was sending on to Breau in prison with his letter. The piercing warning buzzer has been sounding for a while, indicating that a raid is due. Chiba chases after Durand, the bombs drop and Durand is killed. Though the lack of true understanding between the two cultures and the difference of their attitude to life is the point, this piece also feels almost gratuitously uncomprehending, locked in a dance in which all the characters and their fates have a flat inevitability. In contrast, the portrait of the hardbitten want of a country near defeat is perhaps its defining clarity.