"C.S. Lewis versus Paul Auster"

A Review

by Cándido Pintos Andrés

Source for image

Sometimes a book calls you up at the right moment. More than twenty years ago the film “Shadowlands” was recommended to me by a friend, after a long talk about God and grief. My love for Debra Winger did the rest; that is how I found C.S. Lewis and “ A Grief Observed.”

The nights of this grey and rainy autumn were a fabulous opportunity for pulling out of the drawer many films and songs almost forgotten: “Smoke” was the chosen one.

“Smoke” is an independent film from 1995 directed by Wayne Wang and based on a story written by the American author Paul Auster, whose short story “Auggie Wren's Christmas Story” plays an essential role in one of the best and most highly known scenes.

So, with the fresh reading of “A Grief Observed” and Paul Auster unconsciously in my mind, another greyish evening led me to a bookshop and, once among the shelves, my eyes focused instinctively on the last book by Paul Auster: “Baumgartner.” And I bought it

In “Baumgartner,” Paul Auster offers a tender reflection of loss, memory, and grief in such a way that I could not help but think that Paul had been in our reading workshop last week and had rewritten, with other words, many of the paragraphs of C.S. Lewis’s book.

“Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one.” (Lewis)

“He is a human stump now, a half-man who has lost the half of himself that had made him whole, and yes, the missing limbs are still there, and they still hurt, hurt so much that he sometimes feels his body is about to catch fire and consume him on the spot.’ (Auster).

"And grief still feels like fear." (Lewis)

"To live is to feel pain, he told himself, and to live in fear of pain is to refuse to live. "(Auster)

"I had yet to learn that all human relationships end in pain" (Lewis)

“(...) to be as deeply connected as they were when she was alive can continue even in death for if one dies before the other, the living one can keep the dead one going in a sort of temporary limbo between life and not-life, but when the living one also dies, that is the end of it (...) ”(Auster)

So ..was this book calling me up? I will never know it but the fact was that I felt I had closed the circle.

Links:

• “Shadowlands” 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108101/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

https://youtu.be/NLKS0XGRYi8?si=BGwKj81gj1MBSNyJ

• “Smoke”

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114478/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

https://youtu.be/3v8r-ec4V2M?si=hSd2JLiRDmsO_PMH

•  “Auggie Wren's Christmas Story” by Paul Auster (just 5 pages ! )

http://www.xtec.cat/~dsanz4/materiales/auggie_wren.pdf

• Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (scene of “Smoke”) 

https://youtu.be/_kCUbw8Ug28?si=9xpOWizeQ7AmU0wA

• New York Times review: Auster and C.S.Lewis

https://lithub.com/5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-11-9-2023/

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/books/review/paul-auster-baumgartner.html

By Cándido Pintos Andrés

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Exploring C.S. Lewis "A Grief Observed."

A Grief Observed by C.S.Lewis de Ana María Sánchez Mosquera

"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

 

"I / eye: The Dismembered Body and the Dismembered Mind"

in Edgar Allan Poe’s

“The Tell-Tale Heart”

Source for photo

“Barrie Kosky's second appearance at the International festival could not be more different from his debut last year...his meticulous staging of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart is pitch black, tense and savage. The curtains open to reveal the apparently disembodied head of performer Martin Niedermair, hovering in an unnerving silence ...Poe's narrator claims he is not mad, but suffers an "over-acuteness of the senses". Such is the condition that Kosky inflicts on his audience. We become painfully aware of the noises that escape from Niedermair as he describes how he came to murder an old man: the slick of his tongue against his chin, the hiss he emits as he dismembers the corpse; even the slap of his hands against his thighs is discombobulating”

 https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/aug/11/theatre 

 (Edinburgh International festival 2008)

Little I remember of this performance, but one image still clings forcefully to my mind and I remember through the dust of memory, the shadow of a man, sometimes on a chair, more dramatically on the stairs, surrounded by a pitch black stage with an occassional intense light showering on him. I now fancy this silhouette cutting the empty darkness with protruding veins on his throat and raving eyes.   The oppressive animated movie narrated by James Mason and directed by Ted Parmalee in 1953 (here) has played the tune of remembrance hand in hand with this performance.

What is madness if not an over acuteness of the senses: the ticking of the clock, the beating of the heart, the creaking of doors, the prodding conscience, the eye / I, the vulture I/ eye that disturbs the narrator. It is the old man’s I/ eye that obsesses the narrator, not greed, not his wrong-doing. It is the eye/ I that triggers the murderous instinct and sets the narrator’s plan in motion: to get rid of the old man. In the process, the reader must be won over as a convinced acolyte of the narrator’s sanity and witness to his/her minute and stealthy ways.  "Excusatio non petita accusatio manifesta."

One might say that what bothers the narrator in this equation of onomatopeic resemblance between the two words eye /I might be “the otherness” of the old man. The multiple selves of the schizophrenic mind may provide grounds to read the narrator’s obsession with the old man as a possible projection of his/her own self , a self that s/he may not want to come to terms with or cannot, a self that is possessed / evilized by something larger than itself. The narrative voice states that “ this idea entered my brain.” The idea becomes bigger and more materialized than the narrator, who seems to be an unreliable bodiless mass of highly interjected words and sentences, proof of the nervous state in which this conscience flounders.

The gender identity of the narrator has also been discussed. By the end of the nineteenth century,  there existed accentuated double standards for men and women.  Women were commonly associated with roles of nurturers, caregivers and guardian angels of the hearth.  Gothic narratives and nineteenth century novels often challenged openly or more seclusively these double standards and, as a result, a paralell narrative of fallen women ensue.  Women characters were prone to appear as deranged women, suffering nervous breakdowns, torn asundered by the so called moral standards.  All of these fed the imagination and kept the guardians of the moral at bay by separating the intricacies of doublefolded nature.   A discussion of whether Poe's narrator might be a woman will certainly fuel a quarry of interpretation regarding the roles of women at the time. 

Sonia pointed out the phrase: “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing” where the diatribe about the marked gender narrator might be conclusive.

Some of the readings held in our discussion were really interesting: the “scantlings” on the floor where the narrator hides the dismembered body (Belén Tizón) have the shape of a cross, or the title has been interpreted as an onomatopeia of the ticking of the clock through the use of the alliterative “t” (Belén Tizón), the reference to the use of the word “tale” as in “fairy tales” (Liam) and its possible implications. Is the presence of the “eye” the eye that sees it all, the presence that wants to exert control...? (Begoña’s thesis).

Engage in the thread and post your insightful readings:)

Week 4: "The Turn of the Screw"

 

Last entry on Henry James`"The Turn of the Screw"

Reviewed by Cándido Pintos Andrés

and Marián Machado Panete

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 “The Turn of the Screw”

reviewed by Cándido Pintos Andrés

After 23 chapters of intrigue , mistery and cliffhanger endings, I faced the last one with many questions and just a few pages left to find the answers. After some minutes of reading, I felt  really disappointed because there was no clear explanation for what I was looking for. Are you kidding me Henry ? After all your periphrasis and verbosity and long and intricated phrases is THIS the end? Maybe you want me to feel as lost as the governess or maybe you are The Master of Ambiguity. Perhaps you want me to think of ghosts and sex and corruption and lies at the same time. Maybe you did not finish the tale because you did not want us to gather around the fire with Douglas to find the truth. Or maybe I am losing my mind and that's exactly what you want.

  "The Turn of the Screw"

Reviewed by Marián Machado Panete

If building suspense involves withholding information and raising questions that arouses everyone’s curiosity, we are in front of one of the best examples. This psychological book grips the reader without explicit physical dangers; however the successive chain of events trigger a sense of dread all along the novella. The very end comes as a complete surprise.

Before nowadays serial “cliffhangers” and even Bluma Zeigarnik’s study on memory, in which she compared memory in relation to interrupted and completed tasks, he was able to hold the audience in thrall. Ambiguity, unfinished dialogues and lavish supply of vocabulary arranged in long sentences paved the way for this work of art. No surprise the book has been adapted several times in a variety of media: play, opera, films and a miniseries.

I highly recommend listening to the story. The sound of the words and the rhythm of the language amplifies the suspense.

Week 3: "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James

 

Reviews by Belén Tizón Méndez

and Begoña Rodriguez Varela

Chapters 13-18: The Turn of the

 Screw by Henry James reviewed by Belén Tizón Méndez

 

Source for picture: here

The recurrent topics of this novel are present in these chapters. The governess’ fears for the children are a constant, and, in her attempts to prevent them from being corrupted, she overprotects them. This excessive protection turns her into a manipulative being;she instances the children to write letters to their uncle but does not allow them to send those letters under the pretence of it just being an educational task. She persistently advocates her role as Flora’s and Miles’s nurturer par excellence.

Hallucination and secrecy are also a theme in these pages. The governess finds Mrs Jessel usurping her desk and mistrusts her intentions. The desk is a symbol of power, control exerted by the governess and, Miss Jessel, for some strange reason, challenges this control by occupying it. Suspicion looms. Neither Flora nor Mrs Grose care about the governess’s absence.

The governess keeps showing her insecurity, as a stereotype of a woman of the time, in this drifting vessel commanded by obscure characters.

Towards denôument....

 A review of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw

by Begoña Rodríguez Varela

From the beginning, Douglas’ guests and we, readers alike become jurors of a story written by an unnamed (curious) governess and have to decide whether it is an eerie ghost story or a character study. Clearly, Henry James was a master of this ambiguity. Indeed, openness and ambiguity go hand in hand in this novella and it is impossible to make up our minds. So, was this the author’s main purpose?

Maybe.

In fact, one finds arguments in favour of one thesis or the other. The dialogues between the characters with constant interruptions and probable hidden secrets under carefully selected language help to accumulate tension and create a labyrinthine, claustrophobic atmosphere.

And then, the question arises; Are the ghosts real or just projections of the governess’ own fears and neuroticism? That doesn´t really matter. They are the "real" threats which make the governess shield the not-so-innocent children so obsessively that Flora ends up suffering a nervous breakdown and the governess killing Miles......from suffocation.