Wyrd bið ful aræd!

Over at The View from Hell a week or so ago, Sister Y advanced a recommendation for reading Somerset Maugham‘s Of Human Bondage (1915).   I frequently pass up recommendations for reading due to something of an ambivalent relationship I have with literature:  I enjoy it enough, but at the same time I have embedded in my consciousness a sense that reading “good books” serves primarily as a device for signaling one’s membership in a high-status, educated elite.  (Runs in the family:  my mother for a long time put a cartoon from the New Yorker on her refrigerator.  A well dressed woman speaks to a bookstore clerk:  “Just something for the beach, but I did major in English.”)  This fact makes me wonder if literature is a good use for my time.  But the fact that it’s Sister Y abates my skepticism, and I read the book.

Well worth it.  Really well worth it.  As an illustration of how ordinary life can be (is!) filled with heartbreak and frustration, Of Human Bondage has few literary peers, so I can second Sister Y’s recommendation.  Our hero, Phillip Carey, is orphaned, fails in romance, fails in in his preferred career, fails to achieve his life objectives, encounters shocking deaths (one a suicide, the other one of an innocent child), and naturally endures no small amount of suffering and humiliation in his own right. It’s a fine remedy for unwarranted cheerfulness, which is to say, most cheerfulness.

Sister Y, in her post, concentrates on the image of a Persian rug and its meaning, pursued throughout the novel.  That’s a trope well worth pursuing.  But what struck me were two sentences very near the close, as the hero realizes that he’s just not going to realize his hopes for his life.

He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life: had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

After all the disasters Phillip (who is apparently thinking these sentences) has been through, what’s magnificent is how false this rings.  The final sentence in particular is a sentimentalism, a cliché, the sort of thing you would expect to find not in a serious literary novel but in a self-help book or on an inspirational plaque in somebody’s middle-class kitchen.  This is a use of irony, one of a special kind for which I think there must be a more technical term where a sentimental cliché is asserted at the end of a tragedy.  By being son unequal to all that went before it, the nominal sentiment it expresses is actually being mocked.  Call this the irony of the closing cliché, for lack of a better term.

The irony of closing cliché is an old, old game in literature.  I was reminded of an ancient poem — possibly one of the oldest in English, at least in parts — conventionally known as The Wanderer.

I’ll spare your eyesight.  It opens like this.

Oft him anhaga are gebideð,
metudes miltse, þeah þe he modcearig
geond lagulade longe sceolde
hreran mid hondum hrimcealde sæ,
wadan wræclastas. Wyrd bið ful aræd!

I suppose there are many possible translations, but here is mine.

Often the solitary man awaits mercy,
Or the favor of a lord. Though he, heartsick,
Must long through waters turn his oars (lit. his hands)
In icy seas, going the path of exile.
And fate is unmoved.

And onward through 100 or so lines describing the narrator’s loss of everything he ever cared about and his being driven into exile.  But at the end

Wel bið þam þe him are seceð,
frofre to fæder on heofonum þær us eal seo fæstnung stondeð.

That is,

Better for him that seeks mercy,
Consolation from Father in Heaven where for us all safety rests.

I guess those lines ought to be on someone’s kitchen plaque as well.