Is Dangerous Liaisons a cynical book?

Under my previous blog post about Dangerous Liaisons (or Les Liaisons dangereuses), Michael wrote: 

“I feel odd commenting because I’ve never read the book. But I think I still need some convincing that this is a book I would enjoy.

It sounds extraordinarily well written, but didn’t you find the ugliness and corruption of the characters off-putting? I recall, in reading Madame Bovary, feeling like the novel was extremely well-written and a deeply insightful picture of people whom I didn’t like and didn’t want to know (and maybe I’m wrong, but I felt Flaubert felt the same way.) Corrupt or ugly people can be fun to read about of course, but I find I don’t love books where they are the prime focus. There’s a novel by Trollope called The Eustace Diamonds that suffers from this problem; the main character is more or less a sociopath, and I find Thai [sic] tire of her company. Vanity Fair is a counter example, I suppose, but then Becky Sharp is just one character, and there are some other redeeming central characters in that novel that balance her out. Perhaps I’m just an unsophisticated and puritanical American, I don’t know. But Does [sic] Laclos have any redeeming central characters? I guess I just need some convincing that I’d enjoy it.” 

Interesting question, so I thought I’d answer in a blog post. 

To put it simply: is Dangerous Liaisons a cynical book that just focuses on people’s ugliness and corruption? 

I’d say no. 

Firstly, Dangerous Liaisons is not a celebration of cynicism and corruption. The sex games, the manipulation, the way Merteuil and Valmont play with others’ feelings bring misery to everyone involved, including themselves.

Secondly, Choderlos de Laclos dissects the cruelty and depravity of these two characters, but doesn’t depict these traits as universal or common traits of humanity—Merteuil is seen as exceptionally evil; she is, in the end, condemned and shunned by society. 

Contrast that with Balzac’s vision of life in Eugénie Grandet: “She has the noblest qualities of sorrow, the saintliness of one who has never soiled her soul by contact with the world…” (translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley). In Eugénie Grandet, the world is corrupt; everyone is materialistic, selfish, scheming, dishonest; the father has no humanity; the only good people are Eugénie Grandet, her mother, and Nana, who do not understand society and its lies and deceit, who are not soiled “by contact with the world.” 

That is not the vision of life in Dangerous Liaisons: Cécile de Volanges, her mother Madame de Volanges, Madame de Tourvel, Madame de Rosemonde (Valmont’s aunt) are good people; Danceny is also arguably good-natured, though his infidelity to Cécile is disappointing. 

Thirdly, evil doesn’t triumph. It corrupts, it destroys, but it doesn’t win in the end. Think about King Lear: evil destroys many things in its wake and kills Cordelia (and arguably Lear), but the evil characters of the play—Cornwall, Oswald, Goneril, Regan, Edmund—are all defeated. It is similar with Dangerous Liaisons. 

Choderlos de Laclos depicts two characters who like pulling the strings and manipulating other people and having power over them, but they gradually realise that many things are beyond their control. Despite their cleverness, despite their manipulation, despite their understanding of psychology, Merteuil cannot control Valmont, Valmont cannot control his own feelings for Tourvel, Merteuil cannot triumph over Cécile. Their little games are all futile. 

Contrast Laclos’s vision of life in Dangerous Liaisons and the vision of life in Naomi: Tanizaki’s book is a picture of perversity, control, and baseness; the manipulative character triumphs in the end; Naomi left a bad taste in my mouth. That is not the case for Dangerous Liaisons. 

Most importantly, Dangerous Liaisons is a masterpiece. Choderlos de Laclos’s psychological insight and talent for characterisation are astonishing. Even if it doesn’t end up as one of your favourite novels (which after all is personal), it is very much worth reading. 

Musings on Flannery O’Connor and vision

There is often something violent in the works of Flannery O’Connor. In A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, the weakest stories are those in which nothing happens—like “A Stroke of Good Fortune” or “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”—stories of nothing happening, the domain of Chekhov, are not her thing. In her best stories, there’s usually something shocking, something violent or brutal or destructive. And she doesn’t hold back. 

Flannery O’Connor is a strange, fascinating writer. Strange, because she has a weird way of seeing and depicting things, and I often find her elusive. Fascinating, as she has an imposing personality and an uncompromising, pitiless quality. 

Above all, it is strange that I don’t know what draws me to her short stories. Not long ago, I tweeted that I didn’t find the great works of Russian literature depressing even though they depicted war, disease, death, cruelty, humiliation, suffering… whereas the works of Tanizaki (specifically Naomi), Joyce Carol Oates, or Elfriede Jelinek filled me with disgust and left a bad taste in my mouth. The difference, I’ve concluded, is in vision: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky…, in spite of everything, still demonstrate a love of life and humanity, and a belief in freedom and human dignity; Vasily Grossman, even when he writes about the worst horrors of the 20th century, believes in dignity and kindness and offers a glimpse of hope; whereas the works of Tanizaki, Elfriede Jelinek, or Joyce Carol Oates are devoid of light, depicting human beings as just base and depraved. 

I don’t share such a vision of life. Even my current job, in which I regularly speak to refugees, victims of religious persecution, and victims of human trafficking, doesn’t make me cynical, for I still see people stand up for the truth and for justice, I still see people try to help others, I still see people try to make changes. 

Why then do I like Flannery O’Connor? She has a dark, dark view of humanity. In one story, a group of fugitives kills an entire family. In two stories, some men deceive and take advantage of disabled women. In another story, a group of adolescents causes havoc for no reason but their own meanness, and sets the woods on fire. And there’s a story in which a grandfather, the moment he’s needed the most, rejects his own grandson and debases himself out of fear and cowardice. It is a cold, brutal world she depicts and there is no glimpse of hope, no glimpse of human kindness. 

And yet, her stories don’t leave a bad taste in my mouth. Why? What does she have that Elfriede Jelinek, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tanizaki lack? 

East Asian literature 2020

2020 somehow became my year of East Asian literature and I’ve just realised that I forgot to put up a list of the works I read. Here it is: 

Vietnamese (included because Vietnam is culturally East Asian even though it is geographically Southeast Asian): 

- Nguyễn Du: Văn tế thập loại chúng sinh (Văn chiêu hồn), Truyện Kiều. 

- Đoàn Thị Điểm/ Phan Huy Ích: Chinh phụ ngâm (translated into verse in chữ Nôm from the original in chữ Hán by Đặng Trần Côn). 

- Nguyễn Gia Thiều: Cung oán ngâm khúc. 

Japanese: 

- Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji (trans. Royall Tyler), The Diary of Lady Murasaki (trans. Richard Bowring).

- Sei Shonagon: The Pillow Book (trans. Meredith McKinney). 

- The daughter of Sugawara Takasue, also known as Lady Sarashina: Sarashina Nikki (retitled As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, trans. Ivan Morris).

- Natsume Soseki: Kokoro (trans. Meredith McKinney), Kusamakura (retitled The Three-Cornered World, trans. Alan Turney).

- Kawabata Yasunari: The Sound of the Mountain (trans. Edward. G. Seidensticker), Snow Country (trans. Edward. G. Seidensticker).

- Tanizaki Junichiro: Some Prefer Nettles (trans. Edward. G. Seidensticker), Naomi (trans. Anthony H. Chambers). 

- Akutagawa Ryunosuke : Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (trans. Jay Rubin).

- Abe Kobo: The Woman in the Dunes (trans. E. L. Saunders). 

Chinese: 

- Cao Xueqin: Hong lou meng, also known as Dream of the Red Chamber, A Dream of Red Mansions, or The Story of the Stone, and Hồng lâu mộng in Vietnamese (trans. Vũ Bội Hoàng group). 

In total: 4 long poems, a collection of short stories, 10 thin or average-sized books (not including the collection and Truyện Kiều), and 2 doorstoppers. 

All were newly discovered authors except for Nguyễn Du (because what Vietnamese person doesn’t grow up with Nguyễn Du?). 

Favourites: 

Hong lou meng

The Tale of Genji

Truyện Kiều 

Kokoro 

Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

The Pillow Book 

Some Prefer Nettles: images, themes, women

1/ I don’t have much to say about Tanizaki’s prose (in Seidensticker’s translation). Some Prefer Nettles is mostly dialogue and Kaname’s thoughts and long passages about Japan or bunraku puppets. But once in a while there’s an interesting sentence. 

“The sea, clear into the distance, was so bright a blue that it turned black as one stared at it. Even the smoke from the ships seemed motionless. Now and then, with the faintest breath of a breeze, the leaflet stirred very lightly and a tear in the paper door rustled like a kite.” (Ch.10) 

Or this passage, when Kaname thinks about that time he went to the pantomimes at the Mibu temple in Kyoto. 

“The lazy warmth of spring bathed the temple precincts, and in the stands he felt a pleasant drowsiness came over him. […] It was as if a hundred formless and uncollected dreams were passing through his mind, the dreaming and the waking fused one into the other… Call it a taste of the joys of great peace, call it a transport to some fairyland, it was a feeling of serene removal from the world such as Kaname had not felt since the day he had been taken, still a child, to see the Kagura dancing at the Shrine of the Sea God in the old downtown section of Tokyo.” (Ch.11) 

The mood comes over him again at the puppet theatre. 

“Here and there a patch of blue sky showed, or a stretch of waving, rustling grass down toward the river. When another theater would have been dark with tobacco smoke, this one was fresh as the out-of-doors, and a spring breeze came in over meadows bright with dandelions and the mauve of clover.” (ibid.) 

I like that.
This is a passage later during the day, also at the puppet theatre in Awaji: 

“… the sunlight showed no sign of fading, and through the chinks in the mats the blue sky still shone as happily as in the morning. It hardly seemed necessary to worry about the plot. Just to lose oneself in the movements of the puppets was enough, and the disorderliness of the audience was no hindrance. Rather the myriad noises and myriad colors combined into a brightness, a liveliness, like a kaleidoscope pointed into the sun, and the eye took from them an over-all harmony.” (ibid.) 

The first 4 sentences are not remarkable, but the last one in that passage has an interesting image. 

2/ See this description when Kaname’s on a ship. 

“Waves danced and shimmered across the ceiling, the serenity of spring on the Inland Sea reflected blue into the softly lighted room. Now and then, as the shadow of an island passed, a smell compounded of flowers and the tide seemed to press stealthily in on him.” (Ch.12) 

3/ The idea of performance runs through the entire novel. In the background we have the bunraku puppets, contrasting between the Osaka ones in the theatre and the larger Awaji ones performed outdoors, which are fascinating. In the foreground are the characters acting. 
Kaname and Misako put on a performance as husband and wife in the presence of people who don’t know about their open marriage, including their son Hiroshi. Hiroshi, they think, also puts on a performance—he senses that something’s not right, but goes along with it and pretends that everything is fine.
Misako in a way also puts on a performance when she’s alone with Kaname—she can’t be herself anymore. 
Kaname sees his mistress Louise crying about her circumstances and asking for money as a performance. He even thinks: 

“The dramatic bill of complaints, however, with its straining and its storming, contained enough comedy to dispel the threat.” (ibid.)  

4/ Is it not curious that Misako’s father doesn’t have a name? He’s known as “the old man” for the entire novel. 

5/ The theme about women in the novel is interesting. 
As I wrote in the previous blog post, Kaname divides women into 2 types—the mother type and the courtesan type, and he thinks a woman has to be either a goddess or a plaything. 
Here’s more: 

“A sensitive woman, a woman with ideas, can only get more troublesome and less likable with the years. Surely, then, one does better to fall in love with the soft of woman one can cherish as a doll.” (Ch.12)  

That is his conclusion after watching the old man with his geisha, O-hisa. 
See what Kaname thinks about his lover Louise, a Eurasian prostitute who is meant to be half Russian half Korean: 

“As a matter of fact, though, it had been the dark glow of her skin, with its faint suggestion of impurity, that had attracted Kaname…” (ibid.) 

I’ll let you judge. 
Later: 

“Had anyone asked about the attachment, he would have said that he found it safest for secret debauchery to go to a house that rarely admitted Japanese, that Mrs Brent’s was cheaper and less time-consuming than a Japanese teahouse, that after he and a woman had been behaving like animals it was somehow easier for them to forget, less damaging to their pride, when they were foreigners to each other.” (ibid.) 

2 sentences later: 

“But, for all that he tried to think of her as no more significant than a beautiful, furry, four-legged beast, Kaname felt in her something that suggested the gladness and exuberance of certain Lamaist statues.” (ibid.) 

Kaname is what the kids would call problematic.
Would I say so about the author, or at least, the book? Probably not.
In Kaname-Misako marriage, Tanizaki does highlight the importance of sex in marriage—Kaname has no hostility towards his wife and in fact can think of her as a friend as they have much in common, he just no longer gets excited by her sexually; Misako suffers in a sexless marriage, then gets a lover; Kaname accepts it, and creates rules for an open marriage and a trial run; they spend most of the novel deciding on when and whether to get a divorce. Tanizaki also depicts Misako as neither a goddess nor a plaything—she’s her own person, with her own ideas. She makes up her own mind to get a divorce, even if there’s no guarantee that she would be with Aso for the rest of her life (which appears shocking to the cousin).  
Louise doesn’t feature much in the novel—the blurb was misleading, as she doesn’t appear until ch.12 and Some Prefer Nettles has 14 chapters. 
What about O-hisa? 

“[The old man] lavished affection on her as on his principal treasure. He trained her in the arts, in cooking, in dress, wherever it was possible to cultivate and refine her […]. O-hisa was allowed to see only puppet shows and to eat only insubstantial Japanese delicacies, and it was hard to believe that she was really satisfied with no more. Now and then she must want to see a movie or to eat a beefsteak.” (Ch.9) 

Kaname’s father-in-law has extreme ideas about doing everything the traditional Japanese way, so he trains her in everything, makes her learn singing and playing the samisen, forces her to read “old dusty books”, dresses her up as a pilgrim, brings her with him to see the Awaji puppet theatre, and picks an uncomfortable area at the theatre because it’s the best spot (ignoring her discomfort), insists on her using the traditional Kyoto bathtub (smaller than the Tokyo bathtub and not as white and bright as the Western one) and not using soap, and so on and so forth. He has her in perfect control and tries to shape her into his ideal woman. 
Slowly Kaname wants to have his own O-hisa—“not this particular O-hisa, ministering to the old man here, but another who belonged to ‘type O-hisa’.” (Ch.14) 
To the old man, and perhaps to Kaname, O-hisa seems to be the perfect woman, satisfying his every whim. However, Tanizaki also shows, in small details here and there, that she’s not quite “converted”—on the surface she does everything the old man wants, but deep down she has little interest in all the things he forces on her. She doesn’t turn into a different person. 

This is a good read.   

Some Prefer Nettles: first impressions, East vs West, 2 types of women

1/ Here is the blurb of Some Prefer Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki: 

“Kaname, a young man from Tokyo, escapes from a loveless marriage into the arms of Louisa, a Eurasian prostitute, tactfully permitting his wife to take a lover. His father-in-law, sensing that the marriage is failing, tries to revitalize it by drawing the couple into an appreciation of classical Japanese arts, especially the puppet theater, which Tanizaki describes magnificently. Kaname’s conflict—whether to embrace the traditional aesthetic and emotional satisfactions that are the mainstay of Japanese culture or to accept the more superficial westernized ways represented by Louisa—is symbolized by the parallels between the puppets of the traditional Japanese theater and the human puppets of the domestic conflict…” 

That looks like a good thing to read after The Sound of the Mountain. Even though they’re a few decades apart—the Kawabata novel was serialised between 1949 and 1954 and Some Prefer Nettles was published in 1929, they share several themes in common: a failing marriage, relationship between two generations, and the clash between East and West, old and new.  
The subject of East vs West has never bothered me much personally, as I embrace both in me, but it is interesting in the context of Japan. Compared to Vietnam, their contact with the West was very different—Japan wasn’t colonised, but was deliberately learning from the West. Several years ago I even read Yukichi Fukuzawa’s autobiography—as Vietnam is still an authoritarian regime and in many ways still under Chinese influence, I’m fascinated by Japan deciding to break out of Chinese influence, learn from the West, adopt modern technology and certain values from the West. Today Japan is one of the most modern countries in the world in terms of technology, but still has a strong, rich culture and tradition—in certain aspects, I think Japan is even more traditional and oppressive than Vietnam (such as gender relations). 
I suppose it’s the high contrast between modernity and tradition in Japan that many foreigners find fascinating. 
It’s therefore interesting to read Japanese writers writing about the East vs West conflict in the early 20th century.  

2/ The blurb is probably unclear—what does an appreciation of classical Japanese arts have to do with saving a marriage? The idea is that Misako’s father (Kaname’s father-in-law) seems to think that the marriage is falling apart because of Western influences—Kaname thinks he is a modern man, they are having a modern marriage, and now they’re contemplating a divorce. 

3/ Chapter 2 has a passage comparing the Japanese bunraku puppets and the Western string puppets. 
In chapter 3, through Kaname, Tanizaki talks about the differences between Tokyo people and Osaka people (to the reserved Tokyo natives, Osaka is associated with the merchant class—loud, coarse, forward, and impudent). There’s an interesting passage about the Japanese tastes. 

“… pure Japanese tastes, such as the old man’s, were dominated by the standards of the Edo period, the period of the two and a half centuries before the Restoration of 1868, and Kaname simply did not like the Edo period. […] Edo culture was colored through and through with the crassness of the merchant class, and no matter where one turned, one could not escape the scent of the market place. […] the very fact that he was a child of the merchants’ quarter made him especially sensitive to its inadequacies, to its vulgarity and its preoccupation with the material. He reacted from it toward the sublime and the ideal.” 

Later: 

“Kaname had an intense feeling of loneliness and deprivation when he thought of the emotional life of the Japanese, so lacking in this particular feeling of worshipfulness. Ancient Japanese court literature and the drama of the feudal ages, with Buddhism a strong and living force behind it, had in its classical dignity something of what he sought, but with the Edo shogunate and the decline of Buddhism even that disappeared.” (ibid.) 

The translation is by Edward G. Seidensticker. 
This is very interesting. Is it true? I have no idea, knowing nothing about Edo culture. But there might be something there. 
Tanizaki wrote Some Prefer Nettles before translating The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese. Having read nothing else by him, I wonder if his writing changes after Genji.  

4/ For whatever reasons, I have always grouped Kawabata and Tanizaki together in my mind, separate from Soseki. That hasn’t changed. 
While Soseki begins Kokoro by introducing the main focus (Sensei) and where the narrator first meets him (Kamakura), Kawabata in The Sound of the Mountain and Tanizaki in Some Prefer Nettles both throw the reader into the middle of a scene, the middle of a conversation. Then the story slowly unfolds, and they start introducing the characters and their relationship with each other. 
Both the Kawabata and the Tanizaki have lots of dialogue, but Kawabata pays more attention to nature, and The Sound of the Mountain is more meditative. Some Prefer Nettles especially has more dialogue after a cousin named Takanatsu Hideo (Japanese order) enters the scene to help Kaname and Misako come to a decision regarding the divorce—for instance, in chapter 6, there are more than 2 pages of dialogue about a dog’s throat. 

5/ As Kaname says to Takanatsu, he divides women in 2 types: the courtesan type and the mother type. 
Later: 

“For Kaname a woman had to be either a goddess or a plaything. Possibly the real reason for his failure with Misako was that she could be neither.” (Ch.8)

That’s not a very healthy way to look at women, is it? 
Tanizaki uses dialogue to contrast between Misako in Kaname’s presence and Misako when she talks to Takanatsu alone. When her husband’s not there, she seems livelier, more animated, more comfortable with herself. 
To my surprise, Kaname doesn’t look at women the way Shingo in Kawabata’s novel does—he doesn’t seem obsessed with breasts, at least so far. 

6/ For Tanizaki’s reputation, the writing in the novel so far is rather tame. But perhaps the subject matter was shocking at the time—Kaname withdraws from his wife sexually and after a while accepts her getting a lover (making the marriage open), even though they have a small son called Hiroshi. 
A large part of the novel seems to be about them hesitating about getting a divorce.