How is Yahweh not a character in the Book of Job? He gets tons of dialogue; he’s the first speaker to say anything aimed at another person; he engages in an extended conversation with the main character. He provokes the entire assault on Job.
The Book of Job is not an attempt to explain the viccissitudes of life as such. They are an attempt to solve the problem of evil. And the argument basically boils down to *God can do whatever the fuck he feels like because he’s bigger and older than you.
*Nor is that my original opinion of Job. I was raised a Pentecostal Christian and bought the standard argument. But then I read the Bible and paid attention, and saw that the God of the Old Testament is, as I said, a malevolent sadist whose primary interest in his human children is to provide meat for his stew.
I don’t know if the “character” is misrepresented, but the idea of “Big Brother” is the most overused and wrongly used literary allusion. I mean, people use it to describe any public accountability at all. Getting a ticket for running a red light, and suddenly “Big Brother” is watching. Nothing in Orwell’s satire is about basic law and order or public safety.
I think that’s about being monitored, as in getting a ticket because an automated camera snaps your license plate as you run the red light. I don’t think anyone refers to a real live policeman pulling you over as Big Brother, do they?
Well, yeah, but that’s my point. The terrifying thing about “Big Brother” wasn’t that he was using technology to bust people for doing illegal things in broad daylight (or broad nightlight, if you will.) Orwell’s nightmare isn’t that people have to obey any rules at all, it’s that people are monitored beyond the basic law and order stuff. It’s no more “big brother” to use a camera to bust somebody for running a red light than it is to use fingerprints to bust them for a murder. It’s laws most people agree with. There’s no “thought crime” involved. I think invoking “Big Brother” is just self-pity – people think they ought to have gotten away with something they know puts other people in danger.
I mean, we can argue about those cameras somewhere else. But the idea that simply getting busted with a photocop for the same thing you would have gotten busted for if a cop was sitting there is far different from what’s in 1984 and what makes 1984 memorable.
I’m not sure I buy into that. I haven’t read 1984 in decades, but my impression of the cultural idea is that being monitored 24/7 is about as unAmerican as it gets. Europe – particularly England – has cameras all over the place in public, but in America it’s a much tougher sell. The idea being that if a cop sits out there and sees me speeding, that’s a fair cop straight up. But an automaton is a different thing entirely. It goes against the free-spirited frontier attitude that the country was founded on, and instead feels much more like socialism. I think that’s what is being conveyed by the reference. Unmonitored anonymity is viewed by many Americans as an unalienable right.
Another angle is that you could conceivably talk yourself out of a ticket by the cop, or even just legitimately be given a pass if, say, you were rushing your pregnant wife to the hospital. (The cop might even give you an escort the rest of the way.) But to get a ticket from a cold, unfeeling, merciless, unblinking overseer? That really does feel like Big Brother.
I could be wrong, but I think you’re off-base on this objection.
Orwell wasn’t American, and 1984 isn’t a defense of the American view of freedom. The book is a criticism of totalitarianism, in which Big Brother watches you to make sure you toe the line in every thought and deed. It’s a serious crime in Oceania to, say, fall in love with the wrong person or fail to believe the latest doctrine - far more serious than running a red light.
I never said he was American. I’m explaining why Americans aptly draw that comparison. I mean, geez, ease off the literal peddle. Next thing you’ll be saying how it doesn’t apply because it’s not the year 1984.
Congratulations, this is exactly the attitude that leads to Big Brother. First step is more cameras, and at more locations other than intersections. Blanket the whole world, since, according to your logic, none of them are monitoring people 24/7, but instead each one is monitoring a specific place.
Do you guys really not get this?
(Jeff, note how this has already happened in London – as I already mentioned – and so I was trying to explain how and why it is different from the American point of view. The camera system in England is a much tougher sell in America. Hopefully our fear of Big Brother will make the idea a complete non-starter, but ever since 9-11 it’s been an inexorable slide in the name of security. As if Ben Franklin never lived.)
To those who have seen only the musical play Oliver!, the character of Fagin is a semi-lovable rogue making the best of it after ‘Reviewing the Situation’ of the vast impoverished sections of early Victorian London. While a villain there’s an asterisk by his name- he’s nothing like Bill Sykes, his former protege who is a bully and murderer and proud of it- he’s just a thief and down deep he really does care about his boys. Most audiences are happy to see him go free in the end.
This is almost the exact opposite of how he appeared in the novel. While referred to as “the merry old Jew” and by other seemingly light epithets he isn’t “lovably immoral” but cold bloodely amoral. He couldn’t give a whit about the boys who thieve for him beyond his own interests, he’s a first order opportunist, has no loyalties, is an accomplice to Nancy’s death by deliberately giving Bill false information (he needs Nancy out of the picture because she’s a threat to him) and he knowingly assists Oliver’s half brother (who’s not in the musical for those who haven’t seen it) in arranging for the boy’s murder. At the end he hangs, going mad from terror in his final hours, and most readers would concede it was a fate he well deserved.
While Dickens always claimed he intended no antisemitism by the character he was pilloried for it by Jewish and socially liberal readers from the moment the book was first read. The musical and several movie adaptations downplay the character’s Jewishness and have softened the character significantly.
(I’ve never seen the David Lean version with Alec Guinness as Fagin: does anybody know how rotten his take on the character was?)
The scene at the end with Fagin in prison refusing to accept Christ as his savior at Oliver’s desperate imploring isn’t anti-Jewish? Well, I actually read it as almost mocking Oliver and Fagin seemed to have some integrity in that scene, refusing pity, but I didn’t think Dickens meant it that way. I assumed he just hated Jews.
(I admire Dickens a great deal, by the way, and wrote it off as sentimental claptrap for a mostly Christian audience. It spoiled the book a bit for me but I still recommend it to people as a good introduction to Dickens.)
Supposedly he didn’t, but there’s simply no way you can call claims of antisemitism with Fagin hypersensitive. Half the time he’s not even referred to as Fagin but as “the Jew”.
I haven’t read it, but Will Eisner (“the Orson Welles of comics”) wrote a graphic novel entitled Fagin the Jew in which, obviously, he’s the protagonist and Dickens is interviewing him. Eisner was himself Jewish, the son of a mother who fled Europe due to pogroms and a father who encountered major antisemitism in Austria and in NYC, and says that Oliver Twist was one of his favorite novels but that he could never get over the portrayal of “the old Jew”, so this was his attempt to reconcile them. (It got mixed reviews.)
Sounds interesting. I’m not a big ‘graphic novels’ guy so haven’t seen what the big deal is about Will Eisner even after reading Scott McCloud, but he obviously did pretty edgy stuff especially for his era.
I liked the earlier mention of Lolita. If there is any author who would be absolutely disgusted with the connotations his or her literary invention has taken, it would be Nabokov. Good thing he died before the World Wide Web was born.
I will randomly through Holden Caulfield in the mix. For a while very uncouth teen novel was called the next Catcher in the Rye, usually with some sketchy asshole at its center. Holden is actually a deeply moral character, very conservative – though not politically, he’s socially conservative – and I suspect that the series of beatnik novels, hippie novels, swinger novels, etc., that were compared to Catcher is part of what drove Jerry to isolation and madness.
I wonder whether this misconception (one I’ve never heard before, BTW) was partly due to the visual misrepresentation caused by usual Vivian Leigh to portary her in the film.
The novel opens about her as folllows:
“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it. …”
That’s clear enough. (I almost said plain enough, but I’m trying to cut down on the punning.) I think that most of us have seen a woman or girl here and there who would certainly be considered a **non-**beauty by general standards of attractiveness, but manage to be charmers in spite of it. That’s the idea.
Wikipedia lists other actresses considered for the part, and while I cannot picture every last one, it seems to me that the creators were not even trying to find one that fits in with the opening description.
Now, I am not saying that very pretty = dumb. Or that intelligent = plain Jane.
But perhaps if a better choice for the portrayal had been made, one that clearly had to use something other than just looks to charm men, the airhead image would not have taken hold. Surely it takes certain kinds of smarts to overcome an inferior level of looks. Now, you may still not be able to improve on General Relativity, or write a Best Seller, but you certainly would rate high in the people skills department. And I don’t think that women who come across as very people-smart are likely to be seen as airheads.
I don’t know if Scarlett is seen as an airhead, at least by people who’ve actually seen the movie and/or read the book. She’s vain and materialistic, but not vacuous. I think she’s seen as cunning and manipulative, which she is, and that’s a different thing from being an airhead.
Of course she is pretty dopey about the whole Ashley thing…