Letter 17, Part 1

Please refer to the links on the ”My Post Series” page of my blog to see the other previous entries.

I provided the text of this letter in the first half of this post, so now it’s time to take it apart.  In approximate order of appearance:

• Numerical and mythological motifs – Hunting for tiny recurring elements in fiction isn’t really my style, but it takes little effort to find the number six all over Cloud Atlas.  It’s in Zedelghem most obviously with Sixsmith and Frobisher’s sextet, though the date of this final letter made me pause for a moment as well.  Frobisher kills himself on 12 December a little over 13 years after Armistice on 11 November 1918 for the war that killed his brother (and whose death still occupies his thoughts even here).  Twelve naturally shares some of its numerological significance with six, and Frobisher has also moved forward by a month, a day, and 12+1 years from Armistice.  There’s also a hydra reference near the end of this letter, with Frobisher calling his sextet “many-headed.”  Several stories contain references to hydras, like the HYDRA nuclear reactor from Half-Lives and a fabricant nursery Sonmi visits with that name in Orison.  It’s a nod to the nature of the novel (and the sextet), both in its plurality and in how it gets more complicated the more one cuts into it.  Meh, I really don’t care for this kind of analysis…

• Sixsmith on the balcony – The movie relocated Zedelghem to Edinburgh and removed Eva entirely, and in the process it lost a good bit of the weight of the scene with Sixsmith and Frobisher on the balcony (though to their credit, they led into it with an added line from Sixsmith’s niece about her uncle being a determined romantic).  Sixsmith simultaneously takes on both Frobisher and Eva’s roles, waiting on the balcony for someone who (as far as he knows at the time) never shows and being the love interest who actually does respond to Frobisher’s notes and comes there to meet him.  It’s quite an accomplishment for a love triangle to be symbolically hefty when two of the parties never meet and one was never even remotely interested.

• The Laughing Cavalier – This 17th century Dutch painting (or a copy of it, rather) would merit little attention as the sole adornment of Frobisher’s last hotel room if it weren’t for the fact that this is the second time that the Laughing Cavalier has been mentioned in Zedelghem.  It served as the finale to the china shop dream sequence in this story’s opening paragraph, where “A monstrous Laughing Cavalier flung against the wall set[s] off a thumping battery of percussion” (43) and jolts Frobisher into waking.  Obvious foreshadowing aside, this does invite a reconsideration of the opening dream as a recreation in miniature of not only all of Zedelghem but of Frobisher’s entire life, tying into the concept of eternal recurrence (see below) as well as…

• The obligatory Freudian analysis – As a general rule I take psychoanalytical criticism a bit more seriously for literature written in the first decades of the 20th century, when Freud was widely-read in literary circles and had yet to be almost completely discredited by the psychological community.  I think Mitchell agrees with me, because there’s loads of really obvious Freudian symbolism in Zedelghem presumably in an attempt to imitate writing of the period.  The recurring significance of dreams – indeed, the one at the beginning even co-stars Frobisher’s father to make it painfully apparent – Jocasta’s name and her relationship to Frobisher as the incestuous mother figure that was really just manipulating him (with an implied non-sexual same-sex Electra complex as a source of jealousy), Frobisher’s frequent complaints about both his real father and his surrogate father Ayrs (both in the artistic sense and in the emotional/familial sense), his decision to end his life by fellating a gun he continues to identify as Ayrs’s…yeah.  This is one of those topics that could take up an entire post, but I’m not going to be the one to write it.  I’m done with Zedelghem after this, at least for a while.

• Frobisher’s classism – A minor note, but for anyone who thought that Frobisher’s friendliness toward Verplancke in the previous letter indicated some form of growth on his part, I have only to point out his patronizing statements here about not wanting to offend the “little people” as a rebuttal.  One could really argue that Frobisher actively resists personal development, or that when he does develop his egotism and refusal to remain entirely serious spoil the effect, just as he’s so committed to the “coda” that is his suicide that he rejects all anticipated arguments against it.  His worldview’s rather bleak, so I’m honestly not all that surprised… 

• Frobisher vs. Ayrs, art theory version – On the other hand, Frobisher’s comments about being a “spent firework” and “becoming music” are all at once egotistic, fatalistic, and notably more idealistic than (how Frobisher conceptualizes) Ayrs’s vision of the value of art.  Ayrs wants to enrich humanity’s stock of wealth and achieve lasting notoriety in the process, taking freely from his environment for inspiration (even when his “environment” includes the work of other composers), whereas Frobisher can at best point to a few indirect inspirations and call the Cloud Atlas Sextet a “waking dream.”  He doesn’t conceptualize his name as distinct from his work; in fact, the latter comes to encompass the former.  Frobisher becomes music in the sense that all artists become their enduring work, memorialized first and foremost in association with their creations.  Similarly, writing is the medium by which the narrators of Cloud Atlas pass their legacies onto each other, a much more definitive theme compared to any of the abstract musings on reincarnation in the novel (or film).  In addition, as I pointed out a while back there’s a parallel to be made between Ayrs’s musical and sexual sterility with Frobisher’s meteoric brilliance, hammered home here by Frobisher’s disgust with the visceral horrors of aging (which also doubles as a reference to Ghastly Ordeal and Cavendish’s revulsion at the occupants of Aurora House – hypocrisy very much intended). 

• The last word on sexuality in Zedelghem – This isn’t something in this letter so much as what’s emphatically missing from this entire story: Frobisher never distinguishes between his attraction to women and his attraction to men.  They’re alike his “vice” in the cemetery scene, and just as his infatuation with Eva never crosses into stable heteronormative territory so too does his love for Sixsmith never come across in expressions of forbidden passion or any similar statements of Otherness.  Despite the cliché of the queer character committing suicide at the end, Zedelghem actually works rather well as a bisexual narrative that doesn’t privilege the queerness of Frobisher’s same-sex attractions over that of his opposite-sex attractions.  The movie version…not so much.

• Nietzchean “reincarnation” – I’m personally not very well-read in Nietzche nor am I overly fond of his worldview as I understand it, but eternal recurrence, a life endlessly repeated like a gramophone being played over and over again, is book!Frobisher’s “comforting” thought of what will happen to him after death (and also the name of Ayrs’s planned masterwork – foreshadowing, yay!).  Discussion of reincarnation is all over Cloud Atlas, unsurprisingly – Luisa gets odd déjà vu moments when reading Frobisher’s letters, Cavendish dismisses these in the screenplay of Half-Lives as New Age nonsense, Zachry’s tribe believes in immortal souls that are immediately reincarnated upon death, Zachry sees Meronym’s birthmark and wonders if she’s Sonmi reborn, etc.  Frobisher, by bringing in one of the most infamous conquistadors as the “precursor” to Ewing, not only hammers home the multi-fronted critique of colonialism of Pacific Journal that partially gets lost in the movie version by having African actors playing Pacific Islanders but also brings out the maddening prospect that Cloud Atlas doesn’t begin with Ewing any more than it ends with Zachry (since the close of Sloosha’s Crossin’ is narrated by Zachry’s son, probably impending extinction of humanity notwithstanding).  For the Frobismith shippers, there’s at least the pleasant thought that Frobisher ranks meeting Sixsmith and going to Corsica with him alongside Adrian’s death and the completion of his sextet as the most significant moments of his life, and the ones it seems he’d most like to live again.  The film replaces this with belief in “another world…a better world,” which…doesn’t have quite the same philosophical weight, but it fits for a protagonist who feels much more menaced by intolerance than his book counterpart.

• “Sunt lacrimæ rerum” – In my brief forays in the Frobismith fandom I’ve seen these lines casually tossed about here and there.  I think they’re code for “I read the book,” but I could be wrong.  Anyway, Frobisher takes his last written words from the Aeneid, and evidently the phrase can mean either “There are tears of things” or “There are tears for things.”  That’s a rather important difference in prepositions, but Latin’s noun declension system is occasionally clumsy like that.  As much as this sounds like something sufficiently mournful that one would use for an epitaph (as Frobisher does), in its full context this quote is actually a hopeful one.  The contradiction in these two interpretations makes this line rather fitting as Frobisher’s final statement. 

• The value of explicit movie!Frobismith – I’d feel remiss if I didn’t at least nod to the film’s decision to make the end of Zedelghem more of a traditional romantic tragedy, replete with added phrases and lines (the aforementioned “another world,” “…where we first kissed” added to the Corsican reminiscence, Megan Sixsmith’s line before her uncle climbs the tower, and so forth) and of course Sixsmith being the one to find Frobisher’s corpse instead of one of the poor startled hotel staff.  The film can’t be blamed for being yet another example of a major queer character dying – they wrote out many things, but I don’t think there’s a way they could have reasonably written out Frobisher’s suicide – but the romantic vagaries of this story in the novel get replaced both in the beginning and the end with scenes that openly acknowledge the nature of Frobisher’s relationship with Sixsmith.  I imagine the directors felt that the novel’s approach was too subtle and easy to miss (or dismiss, for homophobic audiences).  With everything else going on, they probably had a good point.

 In the course of writing this liveblog I’ve often idly wondered if Cloud Atlas would have been better adapted as a mini-series or something like that, where more time could be spent on each narrative and actors wouldn’t have to be constantly recycled, a directorial decision that muddled the novel’s interweaving narrative themes somewhat and led to a lot of yellowface and uncanny-valley levels of bad makeup.  The challenge then would have been making sure the six stories still felt like a cohesive whole, one of the biggest problems with the novel’s structure.  The fact that I can – and just did – re-read one of the stories of Cloud Atlas in isolation and only off-handedly attempt to tie it into the other five stories during this liveblog is a strong indicator that this novel lacks enough overall cohesiveness, especially for readers who have a preexisting preference for one of the genres and/or time periods featured therein…so probably almost all of them.  Oh, well – it’s not as though I’m the first person to accuse either the book or the film of being overly ambitious.

Please refer to the links on the ”My Post Series” page of my blog to see the previous entries.

I’ve thought about posting the entirety of the last letter for a while, and not for the same reasons that I posted all of letters 12 and 13.  This one is longer than those (about 2 ½ pages), and there’s a lot going on that needs to be discussed in the context of both Zedelghem and Cloud Atlas as a whole.  I’m therefore going to transcribe it all in this post, and then in the next and last post in this series I’m going to take this text apart with bullet points.  People who’ve seen the film will recognize a number of lines here and there, though the movie both added and cut out a noticeable bit of content so these scenes aren’t quite the same.  Also this is to ensure that you get the full weight of the feels.

Hôtel Memling, Bruges

Quarter past four in the morning, 12th – XII – 1931

Sixsmith,

Shot myself through the roof of my mouth at five A.M. this morning with V.A.’s Luger.  But I saw you, my dear, dear fellow!  How touched I am that you care so much!  On the belfry’s lookout, yesterday, at sunset.  Sheerest fluke you didn’t see me first.  Had got to that last flight of stairs, when I saw a man in profile leaning on the balcony, gazing at the sea – recognized your natty gabardine coat, your one and only trilby.  One more step up, you’d have seen me crouching in the shadows.  You strolled to the north side – one turn my way, I would have been rumbled.  Watched you for as long as I dared – a minute? – before pulling back and hotfooting it down to Earth.  Don’t be cross.  Thank you ever so for trying to find me.  Did you come on the Kentish Queen? [the boat Frobisher took in the first letter]

Questions rather pointless now, aren’t they?

Wasn’t the sheerest fluke I saw you first, not really.  World’s a shadow theater, an opera, and such things writ large in its libretto.  Don’t be too cross at my role.  You couldn’t understand, no matter how much I explained.  You’re a brilliant physicist, your Rutherford chap et al. agree you’ve got a brilliant future, quite sure they’re right.  But in some fundamentals you’re a dunce.  The healthy can’t understand the emptied, the broken.  You’d try to list all the reasons for living, but I left ‘em behind at Victoria Station back in early summer.  Reason I crept back down from the belvedere was that I can’t have you blaming yourself for failing to dissuade me.  You may anyway, but don’t, Sixsmith, don’t be such an ass.

Likewise, hope you weren’t too disappointed to find me gone from Le Royal [the hotel Frobisher had been writing from for letters 14-16].  The manager got wind of M. Verplancke’s visit.  Obliged to ask me to leave, he said, on account of heavy bookings.  Piffle, but I took the fig leaf.  Frobisher the Stinker wanted a tantrum, but Frobisher the Composer wanted peace and quiet to finish my sextet.  Paid in full – bang went the last Jansch money – and packed my valise.  Wandered crooked alleys and crossed icy canals before coming across this deserted-looking caravansary.  Reception a rarely manned nook under the stairs.  Only ornament in my room a monstrous Laughing Cavalier too ugly to steal and sell.  From my filthy window, one sees the very same dilapidated old windmill on whose steps I napped on my first morning in Bruges.  The very same.  Fancy that.  Around we go.

Knew I’d never see my twenty-fifth birthday.  Am early for once.  The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors.  A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty.  People pontificate, “Suicide is selfishness.”  Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living.  Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one’s audience with one’s mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize.  Cowardice is nothing to do with it – suicide takes considerable courage.  Japanese have the right idea.  No, what’s selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.  The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers’ days by forcing ’em to witness a grotesques-ness.  So I’ll make a thick turban from several towels to muffle the shot and soak up the blood, and do it in the bathtub, so it shouldn’t stain any carpets.  Last night I left a letter under the manager’s day-office door – he’ll find it at eight A.M. tomorrow – informing him of the change in my existential status, so with luck an innocent chambermaid will be spared an unpleasant surprise.  See, I do think of the little people.

Don’t let ’em say I killed myself for love, Sixsmith, that would be too ridiculous.  Was infatuated by Eva Crommelynck for a blink of an eye, but we both know in our hearts who is the sole love of my short, bright life.

Along with this letter and the rest of the Ewing book, I’ve made arrangements for a folder containing my completed manuscript to find you at Le Royal.  Use the Jansch money to defray publishing costs, send copies to everyone on the enclosed list.  Don’t let my family get hold of either of the originals, whatever you do.  Pater’ll sigh, “It’s no Eroica, is it?” and stuff it into a drawer; but it’s an incomparable creation.  Echoes of Scriabin’s White Mass, Stravinsky’s lost footprints, chromatics of the more lunar Debussy, but truth is I don’t know where it came from.  Waking dream.  Will never write anything one-hundredth as good.  Wish I were being immodest, but I’m not.  Cloud Atlas Sextet holds my life, is my life, now I’m spent firework; but at least I’ve been a firework.

People are obscenities.  Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it’ll no longer function.

Luger here.  Thirteen minutes to go.  Feel trepidation, naturally, but my love of this coda is stronger.  An electrical thrill that, like Adrian, I know I am to die.  Pride, that I shall see it through.  Certainties.  Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one’s core.  Cortés’ll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again.  Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again.  Nietzsche’s gramophone record.  When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.

Time cannot permeate this sabbatical.  We do not stay dead long.  Once my Luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat.  Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet.  Such elegant certainties comfort me at this quiet hour.

Sunt lacrimæ rerum.

R.F.

(468-471)

Please refer to the links on the ”My Post Series” page of my blog to see the previous entries.

The timeline is breaking down again, but this time it’s not Mitchell’s fault but Frobisher’s.  The last letter was dated “near the endth” (460) of November, and while the writer actually bothers to give a specific date for this one it’s also written in three pieces, the first two on two consecutive days and the last “six or seven days later” (464) because he’d forgotten about it in his composing frenzy.  In other words, I have no idea when the events of this letter occur in relation to those of the previous one, though thankfully Frobisher’s sense of time returns with painful exactitude for his last note.

The first part sets the stage – Bruges is freezing and Frobisher has caught a cold, and even at this late stage he asks Sixsmith to send him a hot-water bottle.  Sixsmith does rather more than that (as people who’ve seen the film should know), but that’s for the last letter.  The hotel manager, who has nothing in common with the one played by Tom Hanks save his (justified) skepticism of Frobisher’s ability to pay for his room, comes by and gets successfully evaded.  Frobisher is staying there ostensibly as a student (and as we learn later, under a pseudonym) because he doesn’t like to talk about being a composer with people likely to ask intrusive questions of artists.

We get some repeated complaints that Frobisher’s letters to Eva must have all been intercepted, along with an idle wish that Jocasta would show up and sleep with him just so that he could get to Eva through her (and because Ayrs’s wife’s name is an obvious nod to the Jocasta complex, does that make Frobisher/Eva quasi-incestuous?).  He therefore resolves to pay a visit to the van de Veldes’, where Eva stays while at school in Bruges.  The scene at their house, which interrupts a large party in appropriately dramatic fashion, is probably the emotional climax of Zedelghem though it lacks the thematic significance of Frobisher’s split from Ayrs (in either version).  Eva is very angry to find Frobisher barging into the party, explains to him that she shredded his letters, and introduces him to her fiancé Grigoire whom she met in Switzerland.  An argument ensues, Frobisher insults both Belgians and the Swiss, the butler gets involved, and out of spite Frobisher grabs Grigoire and pulls him down the front steps with him as he’s being thrown out of the party.

That all sounds like it ought to be a moment of high anguish for the unrequited lover figure, but this scene, like most of Zedelghem, refuses to remain completely serious because Frobisher is determined against it.  He describes Eva’s emotional changes as musical movements, takes more than one break from his protestations of love to complain about the trombonist playing off key (the only orchestra member who keeps playing during his interruption, because “That’s trombonists for you” (464)…um…sure is?), and even winks at the younger van de Velde girls as he’s being escorted out.  Though he’s heavily scraped up at the end of the passage, he can “Hardly remember what E. even looks likes” (466) but can’t stop thinking about Grigoire’s beautiful hands.  If the fourteenth letter was Ayrs being at his most Cavendish-esque, this is Frobisher’s turn, echoing the curmudgeonly publisher’s many off-color, tone-destroying digressions and observations.  Oh, and there’s probably a parallel between Frobisher pulling Grigoire down the steps and Dermot Hoggins (the exploited writer of Ghastly Ordeal) throwing his critic off a building, so never let it be said that the inter-story parallels work strictly on a character-by-character basis.

This is the point where Frobisher forgot about this letter and lost himself in his manuscript, but he picks up his pen again to record a visit to his room by Verplancke, the musical Bruges policeman who loaned Frobisher his bicycle back in the first letter.  Verplancke, displaying a tact that Frobisher finds surprising, explains that Grigoire intends to charge Frobisher with assault and that it would be in his best interest to leave as soon as possible.  I believe this passage is supposed to demonstrate character growth for Frobisher as this is really the only time that he’s shown actual consideration and fondness for a member of the working class, but then it all comes back to music – Verplancke is still interested in Frobisher’s composing and even manages to get a bit of a preview out of him.  By contrast with his new, brief friendship, Frobisher seems to have lost all of his sexual appetite; he passed by prostitutes in the street without temptation as he was walking to Eva’s party, and now he’s resolutely ignoring a nearby tavern that has “salty boys going in and out at any hour” (468).  This hopefully doesn’t count as an allusion to Raphael from Ewing’s story and what he suffers at the hands of sailors, though Ben Whishaw does play both characters…

In any case, “Music clatters, music swells, music tosses” (468), and with the threat of having to leave the country soon or face arrest we now have the same suicidal urgency that propels Frobisher to finish his sextet as in the movie.

Please refer to the links on the ”My Post Series” page of my blog to see the previous entries.

a.k.a. the one with the deep (or faux-deep) and quotable movie!Frobisher lines

Yep, this fairly short letter written late in November (a few weeks after Frobisher’s flight from Zedelghem) is the source of both “all boundaries are conventions” and “wish I could make you see this brightness,” though admittedly the film does get credit for connecting these and others like them with more philosophical lines and, more importantly, for using the mosaic structure to make them come across as more interconnected to the entire narrative than they are here.  His accompanying symbolic dream in this letter, for instance, readily connects to the sextet but to little else in the novel, as he “dreamt [he] fell from the Imperial Western [the hotel he escaped from at the beginning], clutching [his] drainpipe.  Violin note, misplayed, hideously – that’s [his] sextet’s final note” (461).  The china shop dream was a much better replacement overall, really.

As it is, the actual substance of this letter is minimal.  Frobisher is frantically working on the Cloud Atlas Sextet (no explanation on where he got the name, by the way, but this isn’t the first title drop in the novel – the most obvious and most explained is the one in Sloosha’s Crossin’, so maybe it’s more “jamais vu”), and the rest of the time he’s busily stalking Eva and complaining that she hasn’t yet appeared at the clock tower.  He only even fantasizes about shooting Ayrs because he blames Ayrs and Jocasta for Eva not responding to his note, though he also consoles himself with the (questionable) thought that his talents are irreplaceable and that Ayrs’s masterwork will never be published now.  Seriously though, he follows Eva home from school…creepy.

Two letters to go: one long, multi-part climactic drama and one suicide note.  Yay…