The Count of Monte Cristo

By Alexandre Dumas

There is something deliciously satisfying about a revenge story, which is why we still talk about TV series such as Dallas and Dynasty with their twisted characters who made life miserable for everyone around them, especially those who tried to play along.  We watched week after week being teased along by the possibility of the evil ones getting theirs in the end, but JR and Alexis always managed to stay one step ahead of their avengers.  Revenge stories are as ancient as human society, as if we are as troubled by this need for blood as we are fascinated by it.  When someone does us a great wrong, we often desire revenge with a hunger bordering on obsession.  

Before the rule of law, revenge was handled by the injured parties through duels, which were considered honorable, or by some other means requiring a visit to the confession booth for absolution.  Today, our system of laws and justice takes on the role that eye-for-an-eye vigilantism did in times past.  While this enables us to live in peace, for the most part, there is something a little bit too sanitary for some of us about delegating the function of revenge to a government body.  For these folks, even the death penalty is too humane. 

Revenge is a theme for many of literature’s great and enduring classics.  Ahab seeks to avenge the loss of his leg by killing Moby Dick.  Medea defeats her faithless husband by murdering their sons.   Don Giovanni is undone by his own unwillingness to repent for the harm he has caused countless women.   In The Count of Monte Cristo, like most of these other stories, revenge comes at a high cost and we have to ask was it worth it? 

Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) was a prolific writer of historical fiction in a highly romantic style.  The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo were wildly successful and remain in print a century and a half later.  Both tales involve protagonists seeking revenge for injustices, but The Three Musketeers is more light hearted fun.  The Count of Monte Cristo, on the other hand, is about revenge taken to its ultimate conclusion.  In this book, the main character – a good natured and genuinely honest merchant sailor named Edmond Dantés – falls prey to the ambitions of people he had trusted as friends.  A self-serving politician, whose father’s loyalty to Napoleon could doom his own future, sentences the innocent Dantés to prison for treason in order to prevent his father’s identity from becoming known.  Dantés’ strength of character saves him during his fourteen years in prison because he befriends an ailing priest who imparts a lifetime of education and culture upon this loyal and generous young man.  Dantés’ reward for putting the wellbeing of the priest ahead of his own escape is to learn of a treasure hidden by the priest on a tiny island called Monte Cristo, not far from Elba where the deposed Napolean was sent to exile.

Time, imprisonment, and new-found riches so transform Edmond Dantés that no one recognizes him when he returns to seek revenge against those who had wronged him.  It is only after his escape from prison that he discovers the treachery of people he had trusted and the faithlessness of the woman he still loved.   The once guileless and innocent Dantés is reborn as the Count of Monte Cristo, a compelling and opaque figure with so much money that no one questions who he really is.  The Count studies his enemies to learn their weaknesses in order to ruin them without their knowledge and in the most painful way possible. 

The historical backdrop for The Count of Monte Cristo is the period after Napoleon’s exile, in accordance with the 1814 Treaty of Fountainebleau, leading up to his final defeat at Waterloo.  Napoleon had come to power by exploiting the instability created by the French Revolution.  As emperor, he became an aggressive conqueror and at the height of his power ruled over most of Europe and nearly brought down Russia.  His defeat at Leipzig, in October of 1813, allowed a coalition of nations to install a government in France headed by the long deposed French King.  With the Revolution still fresh in the national memory, many French citizens considered Louis XVIII to be illegitimate.  Napoleon loyalists met in secret to find a way to bring him back from exile and succeeded – for one hundred days until he was overwhelmed at the Battle of Waterloo and banished to the island of Saint Helena off the coast of Africa where he eventually died of cancer.

The betrayal of Edmond Dantés was the result of a conspiracy on the part of two of his friends and the paranoia of a government official whose father had killed a Royalist in a duel.  Dantés could have born all of that had his fiancée, Valentine, remained faithful.  Instead, she married one of the conspirators believing her beloved to be dead and with him had a son whom she loved dearly.  When Dantés, in the person of the Count of Monte Cristo, exacts his revenge there is no way for the story to have a happy ending for the protagonist.  That is the most important lesson from the book.  Revenge may be sweet but it leaves a bitter aftertaste and in the end fails to satisfy.

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander all rights reserved

Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Presidential elections provide many “litmus tests” by which we define the candidates, some valid and some ridiculous.  During the 2008 election, the “War on Terror” and questions about then-Senator Obama’s religious beliefs and patriotism were upstaged by the collapse of the United States’ financial system.   If that had not happened, the election might have turned out differently, but there is no way to know for sure.  As we enter the 2012 presidential campaign season, the death penalty has taken center stage, with each of the Republican candidates trying to show how tough he or she is on crime based on the number of death row inmates executed in their respective states.    In 1988, Michael Dukakis lost the election to George H. W. Bush during a debate in which a questioner asked Governor Dukakis whether he would seek the death penalty if someone raped and murdered his wife, Kitty.  Dukakis unemotionally said that he opposed the death penalty, always had, always would; he didn’t even scold the questioner for throwing a sucker punch.   His lack of outrage, which came across as a lack of empathy for those who had lost loved ones to vicious crimes, turned the tide in his bid for the presidency.  This is because significantly more Americans (greater than 60% at present) favor the death penalty than those who oppose it.  The idea of justice based on revenge has greater appeal than the Christian notions of forgiveness, rehabilitation, and turning the other cheek. 

During the last two decades, support for the death penalty has dropped somewhat, likely because of advances in forensic science which have exonerated a number of death row inmates.  In other words, an unknown number of people have been imprisoned and executed for crimes they did not commit, and an equal number of criminals literally got away with murder.  It is hard to see these wrongly-convicted people as “collateral damage” in the so-called war on crime: they are tragic victims for whom there will never be justice nor will there be revenge.  It would be nice if presidential candidates could have a more nuanced and thoughtful discussion of whether and when to execute someone, but this level of discourse cannot fit into a “tweet” or sound-bite.

People commit heinous crimes for many reasons:  revenge, greed, jealousy, and insanity among the most common.  Some murders happen without any forethought:  they are crimes of passion or anger.  Others happen because of psychoses such as schizophrenia and delusions.  Crime and Punishment, by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, is a compelling analysis of pre-meditated murder and the type of soul-sickness which can drive one to kill another.  In the story, a man, believing himself to be exempt from laws and social norms, decides to commit a murder.  His conscience puts up a good fight but eventually loses ground to perceived messages, signs, and signals which the man uses to justify the crime.  One murder turns into two when the man is caught in the act by the first victim’s slow-witted sister.  The rest of the story concerns the aftermath:  the man, who had thought himself somehow superior to everyone else and not bound by their laws, lives in a state of tormented guilt and paranoia about his crimes until he comes to understand that only by confessing and going to prison will he be set free.

The first part of the story, in which an alienated and disturbed person kills out of a sense of self-righteousness, is all too familiar.  Notorious examples include Jared Lee Loughner’s killing spree aimed at  Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s assault on Columbine High School, and Sueng-Hui Cho’s massacre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.  Each of these men was isolated and angry, and felt completely justified in gunning down innocent victims.  Loughner has been diagnosed as schizophrenic; but Cho, Harris, and Klebold committed suicide rather than surrender, so their diagnoses will never be completely made.  It is clear that mental illnesses and possible personality disorders blinded these young men to the reality that killing others was a far greater crime than any wrong that had been done to them.  If he is ever considered fit to stand trial, Jared Loughner could face the death penalty.  If convicted and executed, would justice truly be served?

Crime and Punishment, is an intricate examination of the interplay between alienation and empathy with which people struggle during desperate times.  The main character of Crime and Punishment, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, lives in miserable poverty.  His squalid living conditions as well as the filth and decay of St. Petersburg’s slums have left him alienated from society.  To him, life seems meaningless and without justice.   As a way of coping Raskolnikov engages in denial, telling himself he is superior in every way to the filthy wretches surrounding him, even though his own clothes are in tatters, and he is always hungry, owes money everywhere, and has pawned everything of value that he owns.  Raskolnikov, like many of his neighbors, harbors a grudge against the local pawnbroker because of her miserliness and abusive treatment of her mentally challenged sister.  There is also a whispered hint of anti-Semitism in discussions about her.  Raskolnikov overhears someone say that the world would be better off if someone would kill the pawnbroker and give her money to the poor; and decides in that instant that it is he who must right this particular wrong in the name of social justice.

While planning the murder, Raskolnikov wrestles with his conscience, his self-respect, and his resentments.  Unlike Loughner, Harris, Klebold, and Cho, Raskolnikov knows that murder is wrong even though his nihilism tells him that life is meaningless and that there is no God.   While his behavior and thoughts suggest that he  suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, he is clearly rational.  After the murders, Raskolnikov’s superiority complex falls away leaving him even more alienated than before.  Moreover, the guilt over his brutal killing of the women eats away at his soul and his life becomes punishment until he is redeemed by the power of selfless love and forgiveness.

Dostoyevsky drew from many of his own life experiences in the writing of Crime and Punishment:  he lived in St. Petersburg and often walked the slums, he spent time doing hard labor in Siberia for being part of a movement to end serfdom, and he struggled with gambling debts for most of his life.  What is interesting is that his political views changed from decidedly socialist to more traditional and nationalistic while serving his time in the prison camp.  At the same time, Dostoyevsky moved away from nihilism and became an orthodox Christian.  These conversions did not, apparently, make him believe that capital punishment was appropriate for heinous crimes.  If Crime and Punishment is a reflection of his philosophy, then it seems he believed that repentance and confession could absolve one of sin; and that forgiveness would heal the families and friends of crime victims to a greater extent than revenge.

 Dostoyevsky was fascinated by the idea of how to live with oneself while carrying the overwhelming burden of guilt from having killed another human being, and that belief in God was not a requirement for having a conscience.  He also sought to understand how one’s living conditions and social status could strengthen one’s innate character defects and lead to deluded thinking.  In other words, guilt and responsibility inhabit a spectrum ranging from insanity to inhumanity.  Raskolnikov was somewhere in the middle:  he had to commit the murders in order to discover his conscience and that was the greatest punishment.  We could, therefore, interpret Crime and Punishment to mean that having a conscience is proof that God exists because, in the end, Raskolnikov admits his guilt, begs forgiveness, humbly accepts his punishment, and is thereby saved.

Almost everyone has an untested opinion about capital punishment because most of us are fortunate enough not to be touched by violent crime.  I, myself, am opposed to the death penalty, but if the unthinkable happened to one of my children or to my husband I might feel differently.  Similarly, a life-long death penalty advocate could change his views if a loved one was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death.   The lessons I take away from Crime and Punishment are that often the greatest punishment is having to live with guilt, that the line between rationality and mental illness can be quite blurry and is easily influenced by environment and heredity, and that we – as a society – owe it to ourselves to be sparing in our use of execution as punishment, lest we lose our humanity in the pursuit of justice.

Copyright 2011 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” so begins Charles Dickens’ story of the French Revolution. For the ruling classes in 18th century France, it was indeed the best of times. The monarchs and many members of the First and Second Estates – nobility and clergy, respectively – enjoyed lives of great comfort, luxury, and often decadence. For members of the Third Estate – peasants, commoners – life was a constant struggle. Many people died of starvation and even more suffered from malnutrition while aristocrats grew fat and surrounded themselves with gilded opulence. It is during this time that Queen Marie-Antoinette famously responded to reports that the people had no bread, “Well, let them eat cake!”

Across the Atlantic Ocean, meanwhile, the American Colonies declared independence from Great Britain and pledged their lives and treasure to the cause. Hostility between Britain and France was long-standing and King Louis and other nobles, having been tutored on the strategic importance of an alliance with America by Benjamin Franklin, provided the vital naval force that the colonies lacked. Supporting the Americans’ bid for independence came at a price, however, and France’s national debt skyrocketed. Inspired by the success of the American Revolution, French commoners began to give voice to their discontent and sought greater representation in the nation’s General Assembly. Food shortages and low wages, a direct result of the national debt, brought long-simmering resentments to a head and the French Revolution began in April of 1789.

With this political backdrop, Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities partly to entertain his readers (and to pay his bills) but also to illuminate the cruelty and savagery of war and oppression. The story begins in a stage coach, carrying Jarvis Lorry, a manager of Tellson’s Bank, with offices in London and Paris, to Dover where he will take a boat to France. En route, a rider stops the coach and gives Mr. Lorry a message that he is to wait at Dover for a young lady who needs an escort to Paris in order to retrieve her father who has been released after eighteen years in The Bastille. The prisoner, Dr. Alexandre Manette, has been imprisoned for political reasons which are integral to the story, although never fully explained to the reader. Lucie Manette, his daughter, had believed herself to be an orphan until receiving word that her father had survived his ordeal but was gravely ill and near death.

The year is 1775 and travelers between England and France are viewed with great suspicion on either end, given France’s alliance with the rebellious American colonies. The French aristocrats and peasants are increasingly suspicious of each other and treachery is rampant. When Miss Manette and Mr. Lorry arrive in Paris, they make contact with Dr. Manette’s former servant, Monsieur Ernest Defarge, who has become a wine merchant in a poor section of the city. After passing the scrutiny of Madame Thérèse Defarge who keeps track of traitors – those who would crush the fermenting revolution – by knitting their names and descriptions into a shroud, Miss Manette and Mr. Lorry are led to the ailing Dr. Manette whose imprisonment has left him in a psychotic state. Two things had sustained the doctor during his ordeal: making shoes and caressing a lock of his baby daughter’s hair, the “golden thread”.

Between the time of Dr. Manette’s release from the Bastille and the storming of that infamous prison on July 14, 1789, the story of the French Revolution takes place. Dickens uses his characters both to represent certain factions as well as to provide a human dimension to the realities of this war. Monsieur Defarge represents the rational revolutionaries who were influenced by some of the great thinkers of the time, notably Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His wife, Madame Defarge, on the other hand symbolizes the pent-up blood lust that, after the fall of the Bastille, corrupted the revolution. Lucie Manette, a rather one-dimensional character, represents pure goodness and light in contrast to Madame Defarge’s vicious darkness. Charles Darnay, whom Lucie eventually marries, is also a mostly uninteresting character. His story, however, of expatriation and repatriation, of mistaken identity, and loyalty gives life to the difficulty of being a French nobleman with a conscience during a time when nobles were indiscriminately slaughtered.

Curiously, the most interesting characters in the book play supporting roles, and Dickens takes his time in developing them. Sydney Carton, a look-alike for Charles Darnay, spends most of the book being an underachieving, alcoholic with a brilliant legal mind. Dr. Manette starts out in a state of pathetic psychosis, regains his mind, loses it again, and by necessity becomes heroic. The Marquis d’Evrémonde is the villain we love to hate who gets his just desserts. Finally, Jerry Cruncher provides some comic relief in his role as a “resurrection man”, who literally raises the dead, although not in the biblical sense.

Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities as a serial which he published himself. In spite of the commercial nature of this work, akin to a TV mini-series, it is a compelling story well-deserving of the label “classic”, not only for its literary merits but also for the universal truths it reveals. The French celebrate Bastille Day the way we Americans commemorate Independence Day. King Louis the 16th and his predecessors used the Bastille, and other prisons, to house enemies of the state. These prisons were places of torture, where suffering was prolonged because death was considered too humane. The storming of the Bastille marked the end of the monarchy; the Revolution, however, had not run out of steam and in the years following Bastille Day, political instability and the invention of the guillotine led to a period known as the “Reign of Terror”. During this time, King Louis the 16th and his queen, Marie Antoinette, lost their heads along with as many as 40,000 others. The oppressors became the oppressed, the prey became the predators.

What A Tale of Two Cities illustrates better than anything else I have read is how the lust for vengeance can easily drown out the voice of reason, turning a fight against a repressive government into a vehicle for another, more brutal, form of repression. Madame Defarge slowly gains the upper hand in her marriage and in leading the revolution after the fall of the Bastille, causing hundreds, perhaps thousands, to line up for the guillotine. No one is safe from her vengeance; even her husband feels her scorn for his loyalty to Dr. Manette during “The Terror”.

From a literary standpoint, A Tale of Two Cities is about duality – as indicated by the title and the opening line – in life and human nature. Certain characters are purely good or evil to emphasize this theme. London is a place of civilized tranquility while in Paris, blood runs down the streets like one of Monsieur Defarges’ broken wine barrels. Charles Darnay, a Frenchman of noble blood, tutors the children of aristocrats in London to support himself and his family. He is hard-working and honest while his double, Sydney Carton, is a ne’er do well who earns enough to support his drinking habit by ghost-writing legal briefs for a prominent barrister. As time passes, however, certain characters develop an internal duality making them far more interesting than Lucie Manette and Charles Darnay, the superficial protagonists of the book.

A Tale of Two Cities ends as it begins, with a famous quote: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.” The writing in between the first and last lines is worthy of such timeless brackets.

Copyright 2011, Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

Independent People

Independent People by Halldór Laxness

Book review by Teresa Friedlander, copyright 2009

Every now and then, I read a book which is so good it takes my breath away; Independent People is one. It is a work of fiction in the tradition of the great Russian novels, describing a society undergoing seismic shifts brought on by forces the people do not fully understand and cannot control. Halldór Laxness won the Nobel Prize for this novel in 1955, but it was not widely read in the English-speaking world and thus languished in obscurity for many years. In my opinion Independent People belongs on the bookshelf with Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and other classic literary works because, like them, it is a tapestry of words: colorful, beautifully detailed, richly textured, and singular. Independent People is both the compelling story of a foolish, tragic, frustrating, and loveable man whose world fails to conform to his expectations and beliefs, and an intimate encounter with the soul of Iceland.

Literally translated from the Icelandic the title, Sjálfstaett Folk, reads “Self-standing Folk,” a perfect label for the main character, Bjarthur of Summerhouses, who values his independence above all else. In a larger sense, this theme is integral to the story of Iceland, a geologically young island nation which evolved from Viking settlements into a modern, independent, parliamentary democracy. To Icelandic peasants, such as Bjarthur of Summerhouses, being completely self-sufficient and beholden to none, is the highest measure of success. But can an individual – or a nation – succeed in isolation? That is the essential question the author analyzes through the story of Bjarthur’s struggle to stand alone, on his own two feet, needing no one and owing nothing.

Bjarthur Jonnson, was born sometime after the year 1910 into the household of the local landholder, the Bailiff at Utirauthsmyri. Global economic changes and a brewing world war created a situation which enabled serfs, such as Bjarthur, to buy their freedom and become crofters, or share-croppers. At age 18, Bjarthur had saved enough to become the owner of Summerhouses, a small croft, and to purchase a herd of sheep. His first act upon taking possession was to laugh in the face of the spirits known to have haunted Summerhouses since the time before the Vikings arrived by refusing to add a stone to the cairn located at the entrance to his property. Bjarthur, an independent man, would pay no tribute to ghosts.

The Mistress of Utirauthsmyri arranged a marriage for Bjarthur to one of her serving girls who, it turned out, was carrying the child of the Bailiff’s son. Bjarthur discovered this fact after the wedding and treated his young wife accordingly. His unhappy marriage was the first of many misfortunes to befall him. During a fierce storm in his first winter at Summerhouses, Bjarthur went out in search of his prized sheep and got caught in a blizzard. Four days later he returned to find his wife dead with a tiny infant on top of her. Despite his hard heart, Bjarthur fell completely in love with the baby whom he named Asta Sollilija (Beloved Sun Lily) and she became the joy and torment of his life.

Independent People spans the period during which Iceland emerged from a centuries’-old agrarian economy, under the control of a few wealthy land owners, in response to political and economic upheaval in the outside world. Halldór Laxness does a masterful job of explaining why that happened and how it affected peasants such as Bjarthur. The author does this by taking us back in time to the volcanic eruptions in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge which gave rise to the island some 20 million years ago. The first human inhabitants, according to legend, were Irish and Scottish Christians who fled attacking Vikings, although there is no archaeological evidence to support this. In the year 874 AD, following discovery of Iceland by explorers, Ingólfr Arnarson, a Norwegian chieftain, became the first settler. (Ingólfr Arnarson is also the name Mr. Laxness chose for the Bailiff as a way of indicating his social status.) Many Norsemen along with their Irish and Scottish slaves emigrated to Iceland across the next 100 years and soon most of the usable land was settled. Around the year 930, the ruling chiefs decided to hold an annual assembly, called “Althing,” in order to resolve disputes, make laws, and appoint juries for trials. This marked the beginning of an independent nation and Althing remained a governing body until the 19th century when the Danish king abolished it.

Bjarthur of Summerhouses, like his contemporaries, was a Christian because church membership was the same as citizenship. Before Christianity arrived in the tenth century, Icelanders looked to pagan gods such as Odin, Freyr, Thor, and Freyja, to explain ancient mysteries. The Christians set about converting pagans with the goal of eradicating the practice altogether, but not everyone agreed to convert and bitter disputes arose. The Althing at the time decided to adopt Christianity as the national religion but permitted the pagans to worship in private. Concurrent with the religious “culture war” clans began merging into larger groups under powerful chieftains who waged a seemingly endless series of attacks against each other. In spite of, or perhaps because of the fighting, this was also when Iceland’s literary arts flourished, giving rise to a great tradition of story-telling, folk lore, and epic poetry. The civil strife finally ended when Norway’s king took over Iceland, around 1260, leaving a power vacuum which the Church took full advantage of. Parishes replaced clans, bishops replaced chieftains, and ancient pagan practices were outlawed. On a spiritual level, however, the Icelanders retained many of their pagan beliefs but adapted them to be compatible with Christian teachings. In Independent People, Bjarthur and his contemporaries go through the rituals of Christianity with a complete lack of spirituality. They are men of the earth and understand that no amount of Christian prayer will tame the forces of nature.

To Bjarthur of Summerhouses and other crofters the fear of famine was ever present owing to Iceland’s short growing season and periodic volcanic eruptions. In the 14th century a particularly large eruption spewed a dark cloud over the northern hemisphere causing the so-called “Little Ice Age” which lasted into the 19th century. A volcanic eruption in 1783 instantly killed 9,000 people as well as most of Iceland’s livestock. By the end of this period, known as the Mist Hardship, roughly one fourth of the population had died of starvation. Icelanders kept the memory of these disasters alive through poems and stories.

Life in Iceland was so difficult that few people noticed or cared that Europe was on the brink of war. Bjarthur was glad when World War One broke out and a sudden demand for Icelandic wool created an economic boom, allowing him to enjoy a degree of material wealth. Instead of worrying about diseases and parasites in sheep, crofters suddenly found themselves being asked to take sides in political battles as a socialist movement arose to challenge the status quo. Independent People is an astute analysis of the attractions of socialism for the world’s workers as well as its fundamental flaws. We in the United States, never having been subjected to the whims of monarchs and land barons, cannot understand a nation embracing socialism or communism. Icelanders, however, were led to believe that socialism would protect the interests of peasants and put them on a par with their former masters. In reality, socialism simply replaced power based on land ownership with centralized urban politics. The Bailiff at Utirauthsmyri moved to Reykjavík where he became an important politician and the peasants, his former serfs, suffered from economic decline caused by his policies.

While Bjarthur of Summerhouses’ world changes profoundly throughout his adulthood, he stubbornly remains the same. I was reminded of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, King Lear from Shakespeare’s play, Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar Named Desire, and Hank Stamper in Sometimes a Great Notion while reading this book. Bjarthur is a character as emotionally challenging as the tragically flawed protagonists of those classic stories because, like them, he is his own worst enemy. Unlike them, and somehow in spite of his meanness and stupidity, he is a gifted poet whose verse is like the sound of water dancing over smooth stones; it turns out he has a beautiful soul. Bjarthur of Summerhouses will make you smile while tears run down your face.

(Important note: The introduction to Independent People is adapted from a condensed retelling of the story and gives away the whole plot. My advice is either to skip it entirely or wait and read it after you have savored the pleasure of Halldór Laxness’ book.)