Book Review: The Tenth Circle

Jodi Picoult is known for her ability to give a human face to intense ethical, moral, and social dilemmas. The Tenth Circle, published in 2006, is no exception. Although the book is two years old, it has received additional attention with its recent release (June 2008) as a Lifetime movie.

One of the elements that makes The Tenth Circle stand out is the integration between graphic novel and traditional text novel. In the acknowledgments of The Tenth Circle, Picoult commends one woman for her response “when I gave her a book that was like nothing she’d ever seen before.”

As media converge, with cell phones carrying Internet access, cameras, and MP3 players, it should be no surprise to see a similar phenomenon taking place in book publishing. Although most graphic novels and print novels stay at a respectable distance and appeal to different crowds, the lines are beginning to blur. (See this website for further rhetorical analysis of the intersections in postmodern texts, particularly this page discussing structure).

The Tenth Circle is about a family’s struggle to deal with events surrounding their fourteen-year-old daughter’s alleged rape. Picoult has handled this theme before (see Salem Falls, 2001). As usual, she does not simplify the issue. She portrays all of the conflicting emotions and muddled scenarios that make the line between consensual sex and rape difficult to define and impossible to gloss over.

Laura Stone is a college English professor. Her favorite class to teach is on Dante’s Inferno, the first of a three-part epic poem called The Divine Comedy. Her daughter, Trixie, is a ninth grader struggling with relationships, fitting in, and a recent breakup. Daniel Stone is a stay-at-home dad and comic book artist. He is working on a graphic novel that follows his hero, Duncan (and alter-ego Wildclaw), through the nine circles of Dante’s hell in search of his missing daughter.

After Trixie comes home and tells her father she has been raped, the ongoing investigation frames a family struggling to rediscover each other. Each section of the novel is preceded by several pages from Daniel’s graphic novel. The events in the graphic novel mirror the events in the text novel, suggesting that Daniel uses his artwork to wrestle with his own life.

Picoult has a gift for portraying raw, sometimes illogical, human responses to tragedy. This feature can make her books painful to read, but it also gives them a high degree of realism and emotional impact. Picoult begins the book in the prologue with these words: “This is how it feels when you realize your child is missing.” She goes on to describe the precise sensations of panic. Daniel’s memory of losing Trixie when she was a small child acts as a concise, symbolic picture of the entire novel.

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante and his guide, Virgil, proceed one level at a time through hell. Information about the fates of sinners is revealed level by level. Picoult’s book follows this structure in more ways than one. Obvious techniques involve the graphic novel excerpts at the start of each chapter, and the progression of discussion in Laura’s college class on the Inferno. Greater subtlety surrounds the gradual revelation of details about Daniel and Laura’s history together and about the truth behind Trixie’s alleged rape.

Like Dante’s Inferno, The Tenth Circle is heavily symbolic, using elements of the Inuit culture in Alaska as well as literature and language to reinforce its main themes. Daniel remembers losing a friendship in Alaska because of cross-cultural differences in communication (verbal versus non verbal). The same dilemma permeates Laura and Daniel’s struggling marriage and Laura and Daniel’s loss of closeness with their daughter.

A telling moment comes in Laura’s class when she asks her students whether Dante’s image of nine circles and nine classifications of sinners remains accurate and comprehensive today. With a jolt, she realizes, “there was a sin Dante had left out, one that belonged in the very deepest pit of hell. If the worst sin of all was betraying others, then what about people who lied to themselves?” (p. 274).

“There should have been a tenth circle,” Laura decides, “a tiny spot the size of the head of a pin, with room for infinite masses. It would be overcrowded with professors who hid in ivy-covered towers instead of facing their broken families. With little girls who had grown up overnight. With husbands who didn’t speak of their past but instead poured it out onto a blank white page” (275).

Although honesty with self and others ultimately offers the single lifeline of hope and restoration to Picoult’s characters, her conclusion remains ambiguous. Does honesty simply mean accepting yourself for who you are, or does it mean a willingness to accept the consequences for your choices? Does it mean allowing others to face the consequences of their choices? Does it mean holding others accountable?

As in other books, Picoult circumvents answers, choosing rather to emphasize the hard questions and complex decisions that individuals are forced to make; because unlike the world portrayed in most comic books, everything in our world cannot be reduced to black and white.

(…Picoult’s newest novel, Change of Heart, was released in March.)

The Lady Lives

“The queen, my lord, is dead.”  

Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, abruptly announced the death of Macbeth’s nefarious queen with these words spoken by Seyton.  But is she really dead?  

In the context of the play, yes.  In the context of literary and popular history, the answer is not so straightforward.  The spirit of Lady Macbeth continues to be a powerful image of ambition, subtle evil, and mental turmoil.

Allusions to Shakespeare’s Lady are widespread in popular culture and literature alike.  

For an example of the fascination of this character, check out the book Lady Macbeth by Susan Frasier King (2007). Read a review here.   

“Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t” (Act I, Scene 5) has become a catchphrase for treachery and seemingly innocuous evils.  The allusions range in topic from salary inequality in sports (see this forum thread) to book titles.  Consider the 1973 murder mystery The Serpent Under It, by Edith Taylor and The Serpent Under, published in South Africa by Rob Marsh.

Then there is the sleepwalking scene, with Lady Macbeth’s fixation on the blood she thinks she sees on her hands: “Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!” (5.1).  Apparently, she was not seeing age spots.  I might not have made that connection but for this article about skin treatments published in the Houston Chronicle.  This scene can also represent the idea of obsessive compulsive behavior, or simply seeing something that is not there.  A blog on the American Civil War battle of Bull Run uses this metaphor. 

The issue of gender is powerfully portrayed in the speech in Act 1, Scene 5 when Lady Macbeth begs the spirits “that tend on mortal thoughts” to “unsex me here” in order to allow her cruelty to run unhindered.  This article in The Harvard Crimson uses the image of Lady Macbeth to discuss the (non)role of gender in leadership.  In the U.K., to call a political figure a “Lady Macbeth” is a controversial act, at once labeling the individual strong and potentially “fiendlike”.

“The milk of human kindness” that Macbeth possesses in too great quantities (Act 1, Scene 5) has gone on to appear in dozens of places.  

It is nearly always used in a positive context, rather than that in which it originally appeared in Macbeth.  In the Albert Finney film Scrooge, based on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, the Ghost of Christmas Present forces Scrooge to drink it.  Charitable projects around the world have also used the phrase (see Google News). 

The list could go on.  Whether as a cautionary tale or an example of strength directed wrongly, Lady Macbeth’s brief, five-act life remains potent as a cultural phenomenon.  John Mullan of The Guardian says it well: “Subtle as well as baleful, Shakespeare’s Scottish queen is no cardboard character.”  Instead, she is a reminder that evil always leaves its mark, on the hand or on the mind, or on the heart.

[EDIT - 9/25/08] See? Once again, the age spots…

Being Impressed by Lit

Linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky once said, “It is almost certain that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called ‘the full human person’ than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do.”

Have you ever said something with absolute certainty, only to realize, upon questioning, that you learned it from a work of fiction? Since the advent of the printing press and the growth of literary publication and distribution, books have the ability to transport readers to places they might never experience.

Similarly, books can – and often do – serve as the foundation for individuals’ knowledge about cultures different from their own, historical events distant from their lifetime, and life situations they have never known. This simple fact gives novels and their writers a great deal of power to effect social change.

For this reason, I have chosen Tony Christini’s website, Imaginative Literature and Social Change, for the next ProfoundNet. Here’s a snippet:

“Imaginative writing can be both literary and political simultaneously, and inevitably is, to varying degrees. In its own way, fiction can accomplish something similar to what Noam Chomsky and many other progressive workers try to accomplish through nonfiction: the creation of works that clarify and better the world socially, politically, culturally…”

Christini says his website, “explores imaginative literature and literary criticism and social change, and in particular how the former two can contribute to the latter.” The site deals primarily with problem novels and plays and propaganda novels.

The site goes no further into judging the impact of literature used for political and/or social change. To fully explore the issue, I think Christini’s analysis needs to follow the argument to its logical conclusion. He cites W.E.B. Dubois, who said, “…all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.”  Literature is subject to bias, and its fictional nature allows inaccuracies to be presented as truth.

Although I fully support the potential positive influences of literature on social change, it is worthwhile to add a cautionary note against allowing literature to entirely replace other forms of inquiry.

Think about Arthur Golden’s novel Memoirs of a Geisha. If a reader was not judicious and did not read the fine print, he or she might not realize that Sayuri, Golden’s narrator, is fictional. She is based on research, but other researchers have criticized Golden’s portrayal of geisha culture. (See Immortal Geisha and EJCJS).

Christini does not mention that Noam Chomsky repeatedly issued this same caution. In an interview, Chomsky responded to a question about the statement quoted on Social Lit. He added, “Literature can heighten your imagination and insight and understanding, but it surely doesn’t provide the evidence that you need to draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions.”

However, with this cautionary note in mind, it is encouraging to see a website that recognizes and seeks to define the role of literature in social change; because, for good or ill, literature has a tremendous amount of power over what we think about, what we think, and how we think.

Thanks, Tony, for your thought-provoking website!

Literature for…Science

At the small liberal arts college I attended, we used to joke about the physical divide between the Arts and Humanities students and the Sciences students. The main street running through campus neatly separated the buildings. Trying to cross the “Dinkel Divide” was risky, especially during the morning and afternoon commutes.

Although other schools may not have the same physical representation of the divide, the sentiments tend to be similar. General education classes for the sciences major include the dreaded literature class, and many arts and humanities majors live in fear of natural and physical sciences requirements.

Not everyone shares this sense of mutual exclusion. The book Math and the Mona Lisa by Bulent Atalay is an interesting discourse rooted in the work of one of the most famous interdisciplinary scholars, Leonardo da Vinci.

Students may recognize the value of broad-based knowledge, or they may simply enjoy literature or science outside their choice of careers, but I think it is fair to say that many students and scholars on each side of the divide fail to see the applicability of study in the other discipline.

Because I am a staunch advocate of the liberal arts and the interconnectedness of all subjects (see the root meaning of the word “encyclopedia” - en-kyklo-paideia, or education in a circular manner), I like to think about ways that the study of literature could hone skills scientists could cross-apply to their own fields.

One possibility is the similarities between the scientific experiments designed by scientists and the social experiments designed by writers. Some novels, particularly those with a political or moral core, begin by asking the reader a question. The story is, in essence, the data of the experiment, from which readers must formulate their own conclusions.

Like characters in literature, facts in science – particularly in controversial areas – are subject to interpretation and manipulation.  Recognizing the craft of storytelling in literature is one way to learn, a) recognition of crafted arguments in science, and b) awareness that individuals can use data to support their own viewpoint.        

Robert Oppenheimer

As technology improves and moves forward at an ever-increasing rate, pure science and its applications can no longer be entirely separate.  (See Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle or the writings of Robert Oppenheimer for more thoughts on this subject).  

Ethical questions that scientists now face are, in their simplest forms, not new. Tampering with nature. Choosing one life over another. The greater good. Authors like Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and N. Hawthorne (“The Birthmark“) dealt with these questions.  So have writers and thinkers all the way back to Hippocrates.  

As modern scientists are called more and more into the spotlight for ethical decision-making, it is important for them to consider the foundations of ethics, so that when a difficult quandary arises, they will have a basis for the choices they are required to make.  Literature is one way to open these valuable discussions.

So how can these crossover skills be emphasized?  

One way to make the ties between literature and science more apparent is to apply a scientific template to a literary product.  Students could take a novel like Frankenstein or Cat’s Cradle with a definite purpose or theme and write it up as a “lab report.”  With what question is the author concerned?  What is his/her hypothesis?  What data are provided by characters and events in the book?  What conclusions does the author want you to derive?  Do other data – history, science, other peoples’ life stories – support these conclusions?

As I said in a previous post, if this topic swerves from traditional literary criticism, bear in mind that the skills or principles are the same, just framed in different vocabulary.  In order to learn the skills, the student may need to complete more traditional analysis of literature.  In order to instill the drive and enthusiasm, the teacher may need to be willing to speak in terms the student can appreciate.

…Incidentally, science for English majors would be the subject for another post altogether, and one I am not qualified to pursue. I would love to hear the thoughts of those who are…