Some more difficult reading this month. There is the continuation of the journey through Dante’s Inferno, and the rest of Marx’s Capital. 

L’inferno- Dante  (1321) 
Continuing through the inferno, this month Cantos 15-22. 

Canto 15 is still the seventh circle, third ring- which holds the violent against God. Those were divided into those violent against God’s person, and those violent against God’s possession, which is nature, God’s daughter, and human endeavor, God’s ‘grandchild’. Canto 15 covers the violent against God’s nature- sodomites 
This canto covers a conversation Dante has with Ser Brunetto, one of the sodomites forced to endlessly walk through the burning sand. This was a father figure to Dante and Dante is heartbroken to find him here in hell. Brunetto lambasts the Florentines and prophecies that Dante will be persecuted. He suggests he stay away from the leaders, and Dante says he will accept whatever Fortune brings his way. 

He asks Brunetto who else is there, and is given a few names, but then Brunetto has to hurry to catch up to his group and leaves. 

Canto 16 finds Dante and Virgil still in the seventh circle, the third ring, covering those that are violent against God’s possession-nature. This still confronts sodomites. Here Dante finds three former friends of his. Towards the end, Virgil is said to toss a belt of Dante’s over the edge from him. The basic idea seems to be that this belt represented Dante’s being able to help himself. One can’t conquer sin generally and particularly, as they would descend to the level below of the fraudulent, he would need spiritual help and discernment. The canto ends with a monster swimming up from below. 

Canto 17 covers the descent down to the 8th circle on the back of the monster Geryon, chosen to represent fraud. But as Virgil is arranging things with Geryon, he tells Dante to go over quickly and see those sitting in the sand: the usurers. This represents the last of the violent against God’s possession- human endeavor. Usury represented the perversion of the biblical injunctive to earn your bread by the sweat of your brow, but attempting to earn a living from simply lending money. Here he is confronted by several men absolutely enthralled with the purses sitting around their necks. The one he has a conversation with is exceptionally rude and beastly, and Dante decides to head back.  

Then they mount on the back of Geryon and are carried down to the eighth level. 

Canto 18 is the arrival of Dante and Virgil in the eighth circle- Malebolge. This is the level of those punished for various types of fraud. This level is cut with ten concentric ditches, and in this canto, Virgil and Dante visit the first two. 

8th circle- first ditch 
This ditch is filled with pimps who sold women for money, and seducers. Dante recognizes one who had sold his sister for political gain. The second is Jason the Argonaut, famed seducer, who seduced and impregnated the queen of Lemnos, then left her. 

8th circle- second ditch 
This ditch is filled with flatterers, who are submerged in human excrement, as a symbol of their brown-nosing. 

Canto 19 
8th circle- third ditch; is filled with simonists, or those that used the church to further personal gain. The sinners here are buried head first in holes and their feet are set on fire. 
Dante speaks with Pope Nicholas, who prophesies about those coming after him. Dante has no pity on him and launches into a diatribe against these men, supposed to be guarding spiritual lives, yet filled with the worst idolatry. 

Canto 20 
Eighth circle- fourth ditch- diviners. The punishment of diviners, those who were fraudulent by trying to convince they could see the future, was to have their heads twisted around backwards so they faced backwards, and were forced to walk backwards towards where they were looking. Virgil points out many of the people in this ditch. He first goes through a rather extended, and what would seem somewhat pointless digression about the geography of how the water falls in a certain region, but leads to his hometown of Mantova, named after the witch Manto. This may be Dante’s attempt to clear Virgil himself from the charge of being a diviner, by showing that he was wrong about certain elements in his story.  

Canto 21 has our pair arriving at the eighth circle, fifth ditch, filled with the grafters, or those that used their public positions for personal gain. This section holds mocking, sarcastic, malevolent and deceptive demons, punishing their charges by plunging them into burning tar. They confront Virgil, and when he commands passage across, they feign humility while plotting harm.  

Canto 22 has the demons escorting Virgil and Dante along the fifth ditch, and when one of the sinners there is caught out, the demons plan to punish him. But the sinner offers a deal: he will call up seven more like him if they will let him go. They debate the merits of this when the sinner escapes their grasp, causing two of them to turn on each other and fall into the tar themselves. While this is happening, Virgil and Dante take off alone. 

The Magic Mountain- Thomas Mann  (1924) 

I’ll quote the back of the book to give the summary of what this novel is: 
“With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss alps- a community exclusively devoted to sickness- s a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality”. 

It’s not so much a narrative with a plot, as a description of different people there and the ideas they have. There are various characters from all over Europe, each with their defining characteristics, and several from outside Europe, who don’t quite fit in. That said, even the European characters are aloof to others. The main character is the German Hans Castrop, there for a visit with his cousin Joachim. 

The initial character that influences Hans is the Italian humanist, Settembrini. Settembrini is countered by Leo Naphta, a communist and Jesuit… yep, you read that correctly. Settembrini and Naphta argue incessantly, and regularly switch positions when it is convenient for them to counter the others points. 

Later, Mynheer Peeperkorn is introduced, a rich and very strong “personality”, who commands everyone’s attention and seems to have some charisma that draws people to him, even though he can’t seem to speak in any coherent sentences. Even Settembrini, who recognizes him as an idiot, is somehow drawn to go along with him, or maybe the crowd, even when he doesn’t want to. Peeperkorn eventually commits suicide when he realizes his own strength is failing him and he doesn’t want to go out on anything but his own terms. This character seems to recognize, if not anticipate, some of the personalities that would soon dominate Europe and draw it into another World War. 

Then a gramophone is introduced, which seems to represent the influence of music specifically, but perhaps art more generally, for “the consoling power of beauty to gloss things over”.  

Towards the end, a young Danish girl, a spiritual medium, enters the sanatorium. One of the doctors there wants to explore this spiritual dimension using science. As he says: “they were dealing with biopsychic projections of subconscious complexes into the objective world”. I see this as the western world recognizing the limits of pure materialism, and yearning for a spiritual dimension, but trying to apply science to the subject in order to define the spiritual in materialist terms.  

The second to last chapter says that a ghost began to walk the sanatorium, the ghost being petulance. People were short with each other and looking for excuses to quarrel, even to physical violence. A ghost is something that was once dead, and is now haunting again. A true anti-semite came, and immediately picked a fight with a Jew, and then there was an affair of honor, a fight between some Russians and Poles. Meanwhile, the humanist and the communist were busy arguing and taking opposing sides to everything the other said. At one point, their so entrenched that they only resolution they can find is a duel, which ends with Settembrini the humanists firing off into the air, and Naphta, shooting himself in the head. 

In the last chapter, Hans is at war, and it is implied that he dies. 

Capital Vol. 1- Karl Marx  (1865) 

Continuing through Marx’s major opus and critique of Capitalism, I’m picking up at section 5. This is only the first of three volumes; the second being over 600 pages and the third being another 1100. But I don’t know that I can take THAT much more. I’m determined to get through Vol 1 though. This work doesn’t really tell us anything about Marxism per se. It’s a relentless critique of capitalism, which, I think we can now categorically state: turned out to be wrong. Though lots of people disagree and still expect it will collapse. The problem is, what Marx thought would arise, socialism, has proven to be so much worse, that it just can’t be the answer. The problems Marx saw were real problems, undoubtedly. But seeing problems and solving them are two different things. While Marx saw the problems, his understanding of them was flawed, and his solution disastrous. Anyway, that’s not really the solution isn’t really the concern here in this work.  

In section 5, Marx reiterates his notions of absolute and relative surplus value. Surplus value, if you don’t know, is essentially profit. Marx thinks that all profit is exploitation of the worker and he is building his case against capitalism by explaining that the entire system is built on theft and is unsustainable. 

In section 6, Marx talks about how the concept of wages hides from the worker just how much he is being taken advantage of, by giving the illusion that he is earning a set amount, which is what his labor is worth. When in reality, his labor is worth much more, but the capitalist is under-paying him in order to extract excess value- profit- out of the laborer’s work. 

Section 7 treats how capital is accumulated. Marx goes through, starting with what he terms simple reproduction, how capitalism demands a constant reproduction. I believe one of his main points here is that the capitalist mode of reproduction reproduces not only the process of increasing commodities, but more importantly, the relation between capital and labor. The second important point Marx stresses is the need for increasing growth. It is this need to expand, while always devouring more, that leads inevitably to a dead-end. Marx treats the expansion of capital as a necessary reduction in labor and further enslavement of the proletariat. One of the important points here is that capitalism must necessarily produce an army of unemployed workers, who would jump at the chance to take anything. 

Section 8 looks at the historical ways we got to this situation. How did societies advance to the point where some had much, and those would develop into the bourgeois, while others had less, and they would develop into the proletariat. Marx’s basic evaluation here is that the breaking of the feudal system created a class of men who were technically free, but now divorced from the land they had worked, they had nothing of the means of production, and so they could only sell their labor. Hence the creation of the proletariat, which is functionally different than the old feudal peasant class. 

Native Son- Richard Wright  (1940) 

This is the story of a young black man, Bigger Thomas, who is angry about his place in the world as a black man. He has things he would like to accomplish, but he feels he is shut out of every real opportunity, simply by being black. He is offered a job by a white man, Mr Dalton. Mr Dalton is a supporter of trying to give blacks more opportunity, and so offers Bigger a job, and even higher than normal pay. On his first day, Mr Dalton tells Bigger to drive his daughter to University. She tells Bigger that she isn’t going to University, but wants Bigger to drive her to meet her friend Jan, an avowed communist who supports black rights as well. Both Mary Dalton and Jan try to engage Bigger, but he, conditioned by a lifetime of mistrust, just wants to be left alone to do his job. The two white people get drunk and returning late at night, he has to carry the daughter up to her room. The mother hears them upstairs, and Bigger, terrified that the mom will find him in her daughter’s room, accidentally smothers the drunk daughter. In a panic, Bigger decides he needs to get rid of the body, and since the daughter was supposed to be leaving for a three day trip that day, he ends up stuffing her dead body into a furnace. He decides to play it cool and oddly enough, for the first time begins to feel a sense of being alive. 

Of course the family notices after a day that Mary is missing. Meanwhile, Bigger decides that he could probably get a ransom of 10 thousand dollars too, and then just disappear. But after the ransom note is received, things begin to go wrong. Finally, it is discovered that the body was burned, so Bigger goes into hiding. He had convinced his girl Bessie to help him with the ransom, but once she knew about everything, he felt he couldn’t just leave her, he would have to kill her too. He does, and is then furiously hunted. 

Of course the police catch up to him in a matter of days and he is vilified in the press before his trial. He believes he never had a chance. But a communist lawyer takes up his cause and tries to defend him in court but relating the backstory of how the national policies of discrimination had produced an entire class of people who felt they had no real opportunity in this country. The lawyer brought up how the American forefathers themselves left the old country to come here and make a new life. But here in the colonies, they had no choice but to either do what they had to do, or die. This same mindset was what Bigger possessed: he felt he had to do whatever it was that was necessary, or die. 

In the end, though, Bigger is sentenced to death and the book ends with him walking to the electric chair. 

The Cherry Orchard- Anton Chekhov  (1903) 

An aristocratic woman with a home in the provinces of Russia, returns after a period of living in France. Her home will be auctioned off, including a large cherry orchard, to pay the mortgage overdue. A friend tries to induce them to cut down the cherry orchard and develop summer cottages, which could be rented to generate enough money to enable them to keep the home.  

The entire family wishes that the estate, including the cherry orchard could be saved. They act as if there is no real problem and continue to spend beyond their means, all while being told they need to act if they are to stave off loss. 

At the end, the family’s belongings are packed up and the orchard is being cut down. 

Go Tell It On The Mountain- Richard Wright  (1953) 

Story of a 14 year old boy, John Grimes, in Harlem and his difficult family relationships. He’s the oldest son and expected to be a preacher like his father. But his father is tyrannical and John hates him. At the same time, he is well-aware that such feelings are sinful and so he struggles with them. The middle section of the book has his father, mother, and his aunt, coming to a prayer meeting, a ‘tarry meeting’ as they call it. They each pray, but during the prayers of each, the author delves into their backstories, and we find out about why they are as they are.  

The last section is the end of the “tarry meetin’ ”, an extended prayer meeting where the individuals wait to hear from the Holy Spirit. In this meeting, the boy, John, falls into a trance-like state where he is confronted with his sin and failures. He sees various figures trying to tell him he will never amount to anything, and yet also sees other telling him to call out to Jesus. He finally gets a momentary glimpse of Jesus as a clear blinding light that offers redemption in spite of his sins. In this moment he is saved. 

Then at the end, as the prayer meeting is over, they are all walking back, and the aunt confronts the father, telling him that if he doesn’t come clean about his past, she will reveal it. He tells her that he has been forgiven of all that. She says he is still the same. 

The themes of the book touch on previous lives before redemption, after redemption, and the struggles they have with the “old man” even while attempting to hold up, sometimes only on the outside for what others can see, the standard they proclaim is truth, and which they want to live, but find they often don’t. 

I found this book surprisingly deep as far as the spiritual struggles go. I was expecting a more typically black story, of oppression and the struggles of racism, of which this story contains elements. But the facet that touched me the most was the deep portrayal of the spiritual struggle. 

The Golden Notebook- Doris Lessing (1962) 

Tedious novel written by a woman in early 60’s Britain about life in 1950’s Britain. Every marriage is populated with women who get married and are immediately neglected by their husbands. As if everyone went into the deal on the assumptions 1) the person I get married to will no longer hold any attraction for me, and 2) each would sleep around as often as could be found. The husbands are all neglectful cheaters, who have zero interests in their own wives, and can seemingly only find some measure of satisfaction in sleeping with women, preferably some married wife in their own social circle. This degeneracy, the compartmentalization it requires, and the resultant sense of being morally adrift is the “fragmentation of society” that the book is ostensibly about. But 600 pages of this moral stupidity is just plain tedious. I will say that at the end, the main character’s daughter is interested in going to a boarding school. Her mom wants to find a progressive school, while the daughter and her friend are set on a more traditional school. Mom worries that such a setting will simply turn her daughter into a duplicate of what society expects, but realizes that this is exactly what her daughter wants. Her daughter is tired of the disruptive shenanigans that her mom and all her mom’s friends pull in order to lead unconventional lives. Her mom’s friends have, in the search to break out of society’s mold, have also managed to break most of their own lives in the process, and her daughter is tired of seeing this. Which is an interesting counterpoint and commentary on the story. 

One of the redeeming qualities the book has, at least for me, is that many of the characters are communist party members who have grown disillusioned with the party, and it’s constant need to justify the evils occurring in the Soviet Union. The honest discussion there about the state of socialism at the time is interesting to me.