Lily Bart and I

Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth is torn. She doesn't have much money but she does have class and charm and beauty, and a strong sense that she belongs in the only world she has ever known: the capital-S Society of calling cards and country estates and professional leisure.

Unable to sustain this lifestyle on the strength of her own means, she has two options. The long-term solution is to marry a wealthy dullard and install herself in permanent comfort. The short-term fix is to trade on the grace and allure that (she hopes) make her indispensable to the friends who tote her around to exotic destinations and prestigious gatherings.

The hypothetical reader I am about to take issue with might see Lily Bart's struggle as antiquated, and take it as an opportunity to gloat, as a twenty-first century woman, about how we've been liberated from the petty concerns of a society that offered women only men as rungs on achievment's laddr. This reader might deem the choice Lily agonizes over an illusion, declaring that either marrying or charming men out of their money amount to the same thing: a genteel form of prostitution.

But I couldn't refrain from gasping with recognition as I walked down Fifth Avenue with her and lay awake listening to her worries at night. Lily Bart is not just caught between marriage and destitution, status and shame, but between pragmatic compromise and idealistic daring. She can rise by swearing love to someone she does not and sacrificing a piece of herself in the bargain, or she can fall on her own terms, in her own skin, alone. The only thing she cannot do is avoid the choice.

A very modern predicament, indeed.

The Godot of Sitcoms

"Mais, à cet endroit, en ce moment, l’humanité c’est nous, que ça nous plaise ou non."
But in this place, in this moment, mankind is us, whether we like it or not.
-Vladimir to Estragon, En Attendant Godot

Although David Brent, the boss on the BBC series The Office, does not start off Season One with much that could objectively grant him bragging rights -- a low-level management position in an office of people who consider him, at best, a clown, coupled with an overbearing demeanor and an in ability to read social cues -- he boasts unapologetically about his skills as a businessman and an entertainer, offers unwanted advice, and fails to navigate even the most straightforward personal encounters again and again and again. His is the swaggering persona you long to see taken down, not subtly with a well-placed jibe, but dramatically and decisively, perhaps with a battering ram.

Over the course of Season Two, he is, indeed, taken down until he is face to face with the pathetic fragility of all the separate failings he was once able to assemble into an identity. I imagine the arc of his career like the trunk of this elephant: one grand swoop down.



Of course by this point it is not satisfying for the viewer, but sad and humbling, and it would be entirely unbearable were it not for the very slight rise at the bottom of the trunk. It is hardly noticeable, hardly a rise at all, but unmistakably present, a leveling off, a flaring out. At the end of this trunk is the residue of humanity accorded to David Brent and to all of us.

The minimalist aesthetic of The Office -- the dingy set, absent soundtrack, and its willingness to linger in the awkward pause after a joke has fallen flat or an exaggeration been unmasked -- is perfectly suited to its ethical project. It does not turn away from its characters. It does not punish the weak and then stalk off in self-congratulatory triumph to celebrate with the noble. Instead, it lingers far longer than we expect with the misfortunate, considering how it is, and what it is like, to continue on, and on and on, even as the outlook bleakens.

Losing the Literal

It is not rare to hear plaints of the sort "I waited for a table at Boogaloo's for literally five million hours until I was so hungry I had to go to WeBe instead!!" or endorsements such as "This bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats with Real Chocolate Clusters is literally the most delicious thing I have ever tasted." These statements do not read as flip or caustic, and I don't even think they're intended as ironic although by definition they are since "literally" is being used in place of its opposite, "figuratively." (Is it ironic that these ironic statements are meant earnestly?)

This would lead one to believe that the standard stock of comparatives and superlatives are not sufficient to the intensity at which we register quotidian disappointments and thrills. To describe our experiences in less forceful terms ("I waited for a very long time," "This tastes good") would make them seem muted, drained of color, hardly worthy of retelling...British, even, in their damp calm. The French may offer such limp praise as "well, it wasn't terrible" but Americans have patience for only the very best and the very worst.

Or perhaps it doesn't have to do with what we feel but with how we know. A generation steeped in narrative, swimming in RSS feeds and news aggregators, in videoblogs and celebrity profiles and HBO mini-series, we watch the artificial and the actual shape each other. When a real University (Cornell) can actively recruit a cartoon character (Alex Doonsebury), there is no question of art imitating life anymore than we imitate our own reflections in a mirror.

The literal is most useful to us as a figure for something else.