Reading Through More Caputo

I have just finished reading the first chapter (and the proceeding Series Preface, Foreword, and Introduction) of John D. Caputo’s What would Jesus Deconstruct? Thus far it is disappointing. I hardly sense the same rigorous passion and playfulness in this book than in another work By Caputo that I read earlier this semester, On Religion. The first chapter of that book both angered me, with its universalistic implications, and enraptured me. From start to finish I swayed back and forth between ferocity and love. This book does not feel like it will have the same playfulness, the same vigorous sense of life. “There is not an ounce of excitement, not a whisper of a thrill. This relationship has all the passion of a pair of titmice. I want to be swept away.” Instead I’m met with Caputo’s self-consciousness. He seems afraid to let loose or seem too heretical from the start so that he won’t scare of his readers. This hesitancy makes the chapter dull and repetitious. Hopefully in the latter chapters I will rediscover the man whose thoughts both excite and enrage me and whose heretical, radical edge keeps me laughing.

A Quick Review of Ann Patchett's "Taft"

Tonight I finished Taft by Ann Patchett. I read it for my Literary Criticism class and I am not impressed.

Taft is the story of John Nickel a former jazz-drummer managing a bar in Memphis. Feeling estranged from his son who’s been moved down to Miami with the mother, Nickel is finding his life rather empty. Then Fay and her brother, Carl, enter his life. They are both only kids, seventeen, he feels compelled to help them. The more he gets involved with their lives the more he finds himself dreaming of their father who recently passed away.

Nickel is the narrator of the story very much to its detriment since he doesn’t have an especially interesting perspective. He’s neither especially insightful, witty, or any number of interesting attributes that would make his narration more compelling. Possibly this is due to Patchett’s hesitancy in taking on a narrator so outside of herself (since she is neither male nor black).

The link between Nickel and Taft seems forced especially since Nickel’s feelings for Fay (who is half his age) are more than paternal. While I understand what Patchett is attempting to evoke with the flashbacks to Taft, she failed miserably. From start to finish Taft was empty, it was as hollow and lonely as a quickie Nickel has with one of his clients at the beginning of the novel.

The Death of Prospero

My mother has always had a rather black thumb when it comes to indoor plants. When I realized that I had not brought my plants back with me after Christmas break I had the feeling that I might possibly return to find them in dire condition. I had not imagined that either would be dead.

Tonight, my first night home for Spring Break, while my mom was showing me her favorite American Idol contestants I looked over and noticed my plants. The African violet is still quite healthy but Prospero, my ivy, is dead. I never realized anyone could be so attached to a plant. When I touched his crispy, dried green leaves I wanted to cry.

Prospero was my first plant. I got him at a ladies luncheon the summer after my freshman year of college. He was my experiment to see if I had inherited my mother’s knack for killing plants. Instead of dying, he thrived (other than that time some of his leaves turned purple for some reason – I guessed that it was the result of being to near a cold window and supposing it must be autumn). He inspired my attempt at growing garlic in my window sill (note: garlic should not be grown indoors unless you have a deep enough pot or poor olfactory senses).

For the last two years he has been my travel companion on the multiple trips back and forth between home and campus. Through these years I’ve coaxed him out of autumn and pruned him. I’ll admit, I’ve talked to him. I’ll miss him.

Where are we headed?

There is a quote from D.H. Lawrence that Dorothy Sayers quotes in her work Are Women Human? which often comes to my mind. “Visited with a shattering glimpse of the obvious,” as she puts it, he observed that “Man is willing to accept woman as …an angel, a devil, a babyface, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won’t accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.” While the world has changed since those words were written I wonder if they still apply today.

Last week as I read the assignment for Literary Criticism, Lawrence’s observation was evident in the work of a man from an earlier generation through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” The story is centered on a young Italian, Giovanni, who falls in love (or infatuation) with Beatrice, the daughter of Dr. Rappaccini who is a brilliant but cold doctor with a fascination for poisonous plants. She is both extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinarily poisonous. Overlooking the more obvious feminine critiques of the story, I noticed how un-human Beatrice is.

From her introduction into the story, Hawthorne denies Beatrice’s character full humanity. She is continually portrayed in extremes; though she has a dual nature (morally and personally completely virtuous while physically a deadly temptress) her attributes are too pure in their elements to reflect human nature which is more diluted and ambiguous. She is portrayed as an angel, a poison, a siren, a flower, but not a human. She is more of an ideal than a personality. Do men still do this to women? Or are we beginning to do this to men as our society becomes more feministic and in turn demasculizing? Or in other words, as women claim the privileged discourse will we reduce a man to a monster, a knight in shining armor, a teddy bear, a doormat, a gamer, a penis, a houseguest, a dictionary, an idea or a curse word?