Hogan/DeadWomenTalking/MurdersintheRueMorgue

Today I finished Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. Not surprisingly, the conclusion of the novel brings a combination of resolution and open-endedness. Also unsurprisingly, this novel did not really turn out to be a whodunit. It was suggested at an early point of the novel that Hale, the local oil baron, was somehow mixed up in all the deaths and that turned out to be just so. But what’s interesting is that Hogan does not make Hale’s conviction and imprisonment the climax of the book; indeed, after following Hale’s trial in some detail, Hogan notes the fact of his conviction in just a single sentence. Although Hale’s imprisonment seems to promise the beginning of a time of healing for the people and the land that have gone through so much, in fact Hogan ends the novel with a final act of destruction: the blowing-up of the Graycloud house in another dynamite attack. Crucially, none of the main characters are killed, despite losing everything they have. Hogan implies, however, that the fact of bare life is enough for these characters because it is the precondition for whatever awaits them once the novel draws to a close.

I also read the next fifty pages of Brian Norman’s Dead Women Talking. In this section of the book, Norman discusses Morrison’s Beloved (of course!), the figure of Ethel Rosenberg in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and the character of Clarance in Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. Along the way, Norman provides a useful description of what the characters he is discussing all have in common, namely, that they serve as a “conduit between present and past, as well as between those who would otherwise not interact.” Kenan’s short story collection, one might argue, is especially well attuned to the issue of posthumous citizenship in that it is concerned so explicitly with the issue of community formation and maintenance, but for Norman, as for other critics who are looking at various aspects of how the past is neither dead nor past, Beloved is exemplary in its ability to work on various levels simultaneously: “Beloved is not solely a psychoanalytic drama of the return of the repressed for one escaped slave, but also an encounter with the nation’s slaveholding past, including its collective memory of dehumanization and painful severing of African connections.” Norman’s discussions are consistently detailed and thought-provoking, concise and exhaustive all at the same time.

This week I’m teaching Edgar Allan Poe and so I thought I’d take a look at Gordon Hessler’s 1971 version of Murders in the Rue Morgue. Poor Poe! The movie has very little to do with his story, being influenced far more by Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera, as well as healthy doses of Hammer Horror, Italian giallo, and Grand Guignol. If that list makes the film seem like a bit of a mess, that’s exactly what it is, albeit an entertaining mess at times. Set in a Paris theater around the turn of the twentieth century, it tells the story of a series of murders that, as unlikely as it seems, are apparently being committed by a man who killed himself 12 years before. The dream sequences are done quite well but the only thing that really makes the film worth watching is the cast, which includes Jason Robards and Herbert Lom. I wonder how on earth they were persuaded to be a part of this absurdity?!