(Don't?) Stop the Carnival

It being February, it seems appropriate to address the ritual, or celebration, of carnival in the West.  It's a time of feasting, parading, drinking, role-reversal and excess.  Reveling, I suppose it could be called; silliness, joyous stupidity, on glorious display.

It seems we can't attribute carnival to the ancient Romans, or for that matter blame them for it, as we can certain other celebrations.  The only festival of ancient Rome I'm aware of taking place in what we call February was that of the Lupercalia.  That festival was in the nature of a purification ritual, a cleansing of he city before spring.  A kind of spring cleaning?  In any case, it seems it involved the sacrifice of a male goat or goats and a dog, after which members of its priesthood would run naked around the Palatine Hill, striking onlookers with strips of the sacrificed animals.  This was apparently a cause of laughter.  Still, it hardly seems like carnival as we know it today.

It was a pre-Christian celebration though, and one the early Church decided was so popular it had to be allowed to continue, though Christianized.  And so it marks the period before Lent.  Thus, we're allowed to wallow in our animal nature and indulge its seemingly endless capacity for depravity of some sort or another before we do harsh penance for being human until Easter, that time of the Resurrection and, oddly, bunnies and eggs, real or chocolate.

The title to this post is taken from a novel by Herman Wouk, Don't Stop the Carnival.  The novel involved the efforts of an American business man who decided to try to run a hotel on a fictional Caribbean island.  As might be expected, he found it difficult to do, mostly as a result of the fact that he, as an American, was incapable of understanding that the islanders were not nearly as concerned with, or impressed by, the needs of operating a business in the American way.  As also might be expected, it is a stereotypical portrayal of a clash of cultures, particularly that of the Caribbean, for comic effect.  Fans of the Caribbean (I am one) may find it enjoyable, even for other reasons.

There's another kind of carnival, though, that Americans are familiar with as traveling shows involving amusement rides, games of chance, freak shows, vendors of various kinds of unhealthy food, and operated by those known as Carnies or Carnys, who have the general reputation of con artists.

I begin to wonder whether our Glorious Republic has taken on the aspect of this latter kind of carnival.  Whether, in other words, it has become a vast, stationary show put on by con artists of one kind or another, who seek for selfish reasons to distract and amuse us while they fleece us like the dumb, gullible sheep we seem intent on being.

It's a show where freaks abound, and are on permanent and blatant display.  There are rides and games aplenty, shills, hawkers, barkers, con artists are everywhere.

It's a carnival of the irrational, even of the absurd.  Professional athletes praise God for their victories, and this is found admirable but should be viewed as blasphemous--what kind of God intervenes to decide the outcome of a football/basketball/baseball game?  A very small one, I would think.  At least Homer's gods intervened in the serious business of a war, though even a war on this tiny dot in the universe can only be of slight significance.

There are outcries over the fact that a character in a movie is not portrayed as being openly gay, because the author of the work decided to indulge an impulse, incomprehensible to me, to declare the character's sexual preferences.  If Dumbledore is gay, what's the sexuality of the other non-existent characters in those books or movies?  Does Hagrid practice bestiality?

Our politicians are too busy trying to win political points, accumulate cash, and browning their noses to engage in the nation's serious business.  Our artists, such as they are, thoughtless and mendacious.  Our statesmanship is short-sighted, our culture--well, perhaps Oscar Wilde was right about us.

Should the carnival that America has become stop, or continue?  Epictetus wisely said that life is a feast, and that we should sample what comes our way during the feasting that's to our liking, taking never too much or too little, without hurry.   We can't control the carnival; neither can we control the feast.  The show will go on, it's fruitless to protest or deplore the fact that it does and will.  What can we do but the best we can that's within our power?  Enjoy the carnival, if you can.  If you can't, ignore it.

Homage to Stephen Crane

He was 28 when he died, at a health spa in the Black Forest of Germany.  What had we achieved by that age, reader?  For my part, very little.  Perhaps you achieved more, or much.  But it's his age at death that makes him most remarkable, in light of what he did in his short life.

I wonder if they still make students read The Red Badge of Courage in high school.  It was during that four year--what?--that I read it.  I suppose that by making us do so at the time, it was intended in some respect to honor Crane.  I think that requiring books to be read during those years does an author a disservice.  It's difficult to enjoy or appreciate a book one is required to read.  But I suppose something else was intended as well, enjoyment and appreciation not being something to be expected by high school students in their studies, at least.

That particular work of Crane made quite a stir when published.  It was, for the time, a different depiction of war.  It's difficult to think of any other depiction in novels of the same sort up until then.  Ambrose Bierce served in the Civil War and wrote some striking short stories about it, but such as Tolstoy were too busy making grand moral points or indulging in Romantic fantasies to do it what can be called justice.  Unlike Bierce, however, Crane had never experienced war when he wrote that book.  It was entirely a work of his imagination, though considered by most to be unusual in its realism.  Crane experienced war subsequently in his capacity as a newspaper correspondent, "embedded" as we (curiously) say now with soldiers fighting the Greco-Turkish and Spanish-American wars.

I remember the words "realism" and "naturalism" associated with his works.  I read now that "impressionism" is associated with them as well.  It's difficult for a mere reader like myself to keep track of literary categorizations, let alone understand them.  But certainly he wrote of things that took place in life and that were not evidently such as it would be unlikely to encounter in life.  He's been compared, I see, with the prolix Emerson and the less prolix Thoreau among American writers.  I don't see it, really, especially the comparison with Emerson.  Crane was far too direct and spare an author to be compared with Emerson, who bloviated on many things; too many things, in fact.  One can understand why Hemingway thought well of him.  Now and then, Hemingway seems to have expressed admiration for certain writers already dead.  Hemingway thought well of Henry James and Mark Twain also.

Twain is an author I was also forced to read in high school and so neither enjoyed nor appreciated at the time.  I revisited him later, and alas was unimpressed.  That's not the case with Crane.  I confess I've paid no attention to James.  Perhaps I'm unduly concerned as it's been claimed that he wrote novels like a philosopher, while his brother William wrote philosophy like a novelist.  The thought of a philosopher writing a novel troubles me.

I think Crane was at his best writing short stories.  The Monster, The Blue Hotel, The Open Boat are certainly among the best I've read.  Short stories have an unfortunate reputation.  It seems to me that they're not taken seriously enough; all are looking to write or read The Great Novel.  Novels invite excess, however, and imprecision; or so it's seemed to me, and I've read my share of them.  Unless, that is, their chapters are written as short stories themselves, as a kind of serial or series of scenes in the life of a person or event.

With apologies to such as Chekov and others, I think it may be said that American authors have written the finest short stories, and it may also be said (by me at least) that this is to be expected.  American civilization isn't quite what Oscar Wilde claimed it to be (nonexistent) but it doesn't seem to encourage extended reflection or effort on any particular thing, and this would be a prerequisite for creating a novel. 

I'm not a fan of Crane's poetry.  His poetry makes him appear immature, while his prose does not.  His prose was innovative in a way we can't understand now, being used to Hemingway and others who succeeded in extending its precision and simplicity in description.  I'm old now, or old enough, and am astonished he wrote as he did and by what he did so young.  Certain geniuses (Mozart, Schubert come to mind in music) are at once prolific and intensely focused, and are enduringly special and unique as a result.  Crane was one of them.