Janus, by Ann Beattie

Audiobook

Review

Summary and analysis

Written by Pere Vila

CONTEXT

Ann Beattie was born in 1947 in Washington D.C. She is an American novelist and short story writer. She has received an award for Excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the short story form.

Beattie reached adulthood during the transformative 1960s, a period marked by the Vietnam War, the rise of drug culture, and the Civil Rights Movement in the southern United States. Although Beattie’s stories aren’t explicitly set in this decade, her characters are undeniably children of the era, shaped by its cultural upheavals. The legacy of the 1960s is evident in their struggles with identity and purpose in a rapidly changing world.

By the 1980s, many of Beattie’s contemporaries, often identified as baby boomers, had established themselves in stable careers and family lives. Despite their material comfort, they suffer emotional and moral disconnection in a world that has yet been rather generous to them in material ways. They now live in suburban and urban settings, and are engaged in professions like finance, law and writing, having transitioned from the radical thinkers of their youth to members of the establishment they once opposed.

Amidst the social evolution of the 1970s and 1980s, minimalism emerged as a significant artistic movement. In art, minimalism utilized small and simple spaces to focus on the subtleties of space and form. In literature, minimalism took on a similar approach, emphasizing what was left unsaid as much as what was articulated. Minimalist writers like Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason and Raymond Carver cut down stories to their essential elements, concentrating on the minutiae of daily life over grandiose moral issues, reinforcing the notion that minimalism can convey profound truths through simplicity.

 

JANUS

Beattie’s story Janus, first published in The New Yorker in 1985 and later included in the collection Where You’ll Find Me, exemplifies her exploration of contemporary life’s vacuity. Janus reflects the desires and disillusionments of the middle and upper-middle-classes, the social groups that Beattie is often considered representing. In this short story, the author expertly combines narrative technique and symbolism to explore themes of longing, memory, and the subtle, pervasive influence that objects can exert on our lives.

Janus, the two-headed ancient Roman divinity, was considered to be the god of doorways, portals, gates, passageways, bridges, and entrances and exits of temples. The people of ancient Rome believed that Janus, with his two heads, witnessed the comings and the goings of people, the past, and the future; but, in modern times, Janus is associated with hypocrisy and being “two-faced”. Both these different connotations of the word “Janus” are present in the Ann Beattie’s short story of the same name.

Janus is the story of a married real estate agent named Andrea who possesses a decorative bowl to which she is greatly attached. Andrea seems to have an obsession with the bowl. She leaves it in the houses that she is engaged to sell and believes that the bowl brings her luck and is responsible for the sale of the houses. She warns her husband against leaving his keys in the bowl and is greatly disturbed by the idea that she might lose it. Andrea believes that she has a ‘relationship’ with the bowl. It is revealed that the bowl is a gift from a former lover. The lover asked her to leave her husband and be only his, but she would not do so. He termed her “two faced”. Andrea wanted a future with her lover, but was unwilling to give up her husband, despite being unsatisfied with him.

Beattie uses the bowl to draw the readers’ attention to deeper themes within the narrative. This object is meticulously placed in various settings, subtly highlighting its significance. The bowl could be interpreted as a reflection of Andrea’s own life: smooth and seemingly perfect, yet fundamentally hollow. It may also signify the materialistic and emotionally barren world experienced by Andrea’s generation as described in the phrase “the world cut in half, deep and smoothly empty”. Furthermore, the bowl is a poignant reminder of Andrea’s former lover, who remains a distant memory, a “vanishing point on the horizon”. This object becomes the remaining relic of her lost relationship, symbolizing her attachment to the past.

The concave shape of the bowl is symbolic of the emptiness and lack of meaning in Andrea’s and her husband’s life. Though never explicitly stated, the absence of children becomes a silent witness to the lack of vitality in her relationship. Andrea consciously chooses not to have children, what is expressed in her obsessive attention and affection for an inanimate object.

As suggested by the tittle, Janus is a deeply ambiguous work of short fiction, open to multiple interpretations, but on the whole, it is a call to abandon banal life and embrace passion.

QUESTIONS

-What do you know about Bonnard and Biedermeier?

-Can you describe an object of yours and tell us its sentimental worth?

-The narrator wants her bowl always empty. What can be the meaning of this mania?

-"He had no more interest in the bowl than she had in his new Leica." Does that mean there were no love between them? What other hints can tell us that a couple are not anymore in love?

-What is a secret? Can a secret be constant / forever?

-"With a lover, there is no exact scenario of how matters would come to close." What things in our lives have a predictable end and what things don't?

-What kind of professions demand to be double-faced? To be double faced is the same as hypocrisy?

-What can be the meaning of the last sentence, "the eye moved toward one small flash of blue, a vanishing point on the horizon"?

VOCABULARY

mutt, batting, still life, flecks, lean, bids, dovetailed

The Cyclops, by Homer

Emily Wilson about Odyssey's translation by a woman

Film (1954. Starring Kirk Douglas. Minute 34 on)

Homer (according to the tradition, a bind man from the 8th century BC) is considered to be the author of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and some other works as the comic epic, The Frogs-Mice War.
But scholars think that the poems follow different oral traditions and that only in the 8^th century they were written down; before that, they were transmitted by generation to generation orally; this is why these narratives are in verse, so this way they were easier to remember. Another curious thing about these epics it that they were composed in an artificial language, a kind of mixture of different Greek dialects belonging to different periods.
 
The Odyssey tells us the adventures of Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin), after defeating the city of Troy, in his travels through the Mediterranean Sea to reach his home on the island of Ithaca, where his son Telemachus and his wife Penelope had been waiting for him while rejecting a crowd of suitors.
In his adventures he meets beautiful women who are almost witches, as Circe and Calypso, cannibals, lotus-eaters, giants, mermaids, dangerous straits, different gods, etc. Finally, he arrives alone home, only to have to deal with his wife's suitors.
Our episode is well-known to everybody. Ulysses arrives in Thrinnacia (Greek name for Sicily) and wants to know about the cyclopes, the singular people that live there: what kind of life they lead and how they organize their society; and he discovers that they are brutal giants without law or civilization. He and his men get trapped in Polyphemus’s cave (whose gate is closed with a huge rock) where the one-eye monster makes a feast of them. However, the cunning Ulysses (who introduces himself to the cyclops as "Noman") devises a scheme to save the rest of his men and escape. They blind the giant and tied themselves under the bellies of the cyclops's lambs when he sends them out to graze. Safe and sound, and from a certain distance of the shore, Ulysses mocks the monster and tells him his real name. Polyphemus throws them a big rock that almost sinks their ship, and he curses him telling him he is going to lose all his men and that he will get home only after a lot of suffering, for he’s the Poseidon’s son and this god is going to make him have a rough time.

QUESTIONS

-Ulysses tells Polyphemus his name is "No man", or "Noman", as a way to deceive him. Some writers decide to write under a pseudonym, and, in spy novels and films, any agent has to have an alias. What is your favourite alias? What alias/pseudonym/nickname would you choose for you?

-Hospitality is generosity to strangers who come to one's home. It was something sacred for ancient cultures. Why do you think it was so important then, and now it isn't so?

-Polyphemus is a one-eyed monster. According to you, what can symbolize this singularity?

-Cyclopes lived without laws or government, and each one was independent or free, so they live in a kind of anarchy. For a lot of people, anarchy is a kind of utopian society, a paradise. We can see that, for Ulysses, it was a badly organized society. What is your opinion about the opposition "anarchy-civilization", as it appears in the story?

VOCABULARY

tillage, over-run, sportsmen, poplars, breakers, run out, stubble, hawsers, outlaw, crag, took stock, pens, whey, strainers, rovers, vouchsafed, vitals, quiver, club, dung, cast lots, ramping, raving, auger, fleece, withies, wont, jeer, rudder, weakling, plight

Macbeth, by Shakespeare / Charles & Mary Lamb

 

Film (2015. Starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard)

Film (1979. Starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench)

Film (1961. Starring Sean Connery)

About Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Love

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was the son of a Stratford-on-Avon wealthy tradesman. He was probably educated at Stratford Grammar School, and at the age of eighteen, married Anne Hathaway, a woman of twenty-six. They had three children; one of them (Hamnet) died in childhood. Shakespeare later left home and went to London. There he joined the theatrical company known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, working as a handyman, actor and finally, playwright.
In 1599, he and other members of this company built the Globe Theatre and made it the outstanding theatre of the time. In 1603, the company became the King’s Men and continued to dominate the London theatrical life. His share in this company and its theatres made Shakespeare wealthy enough to buy a house in Stratford. In 1608, the King’s Men took over another theatre, Blackfriars. When he was 47, he retired to Stratford, where, five years later, he died, according to a tradition, of a fever after a drinking-bout.

Although now Shakespeare is a central focus for scholars, who generally regard him as the greatest artist in world literature, he seemed to have very little interest in a glorious posterity. He thought only in the playhouse audience, as a means of making money. Perhaps his sonnets are the only trace that he dreamt once of being in the Parnassus, but he wasn’t a lyrical poet at all. He didn’t attend university, provoking thus the envy of a lot of writers who did go but didn’t get his success.

Charles Lamb was born 1775 and died in 1834 in London. His father was a lawyer’s clerk. Mary Lamb, his older sister (eleven years his senior) taught him to read when he was a child, after which he got lessons from a governess, and later he went to a charity boarding school. There, pupils usually suffered violence from their teachers, but Lamb seemed to avoid this brutality.

He was a stutterer, so this hindrance disqualified him for the clerical career and he didn’t attend university. He looked for a job and found a situation as a clerk, a job he kept throughout his life.

He fell in love twice. The first time was rejected by the girl’s father because he was only his employee, and the second time was rejected by the girl herself. He died a bachelor.

A tragic event marked the Lamb family: when he was twenty, his sister Mary, in a fit of insanity, killed their mother with a kitchen knife. As a result, Mary spent several periods of her life in different asylums. Charles took care of her, although he suffered episodes of depression.

Nevertheless, Charles and Mary could form a literary salon, or club, called The Lambs, in their house, where people like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, etc, used to meet and discuss books and art, and perform plays.

In 1807, he and his sister adapted several Shakespeare plays for children and entitled the book Tales from Shakespeare. He wrote the tragedies, and Mary the comedies. A year later, he went on with this project by writing The Adventures of Ulysses.

However, what literary critics praised most were his Essays for Elia, where he could display his subtle and humorous candour.

 

SUMMARY

Macbeth is a tragedy about boundless ambition and desire for power.

Macbeth is a thane (that is, a Scottish nobleman) loyal to his king and has just returned from defeating the enemies allied with the Norwegian army. He is strong, brave and violent. On his way home, he meets three witches who prophesy that he will become thane of Cawdor and eventually king. When the first prophesy comes true, Macbeth thinks that the other prophesy will also come true. In order to help to fulfil the prediction, and encouraged by his wife, he murders the King while he’s Macbeth’s guest, and seizes the throne.

Once king, he tries to prevent another prophesy that said Banquo’s son would be king, killing Banquo and his heir, although he was his best friend. Banquo dies, but his son escapes, so from then on, Macbeth doesn’t feel safe. His wife begins to have remorse, and Macbeth suffers fits of madness.

Worried about his situation, Macbeth asks the witches again and receives confusing prophesies that make him believe he is invincible (for example, that a forest will move to attack him, or that a man “not born of woman” will kill him). However, these predictions come true in unexpected ways: the king’s son leads an army camouflaged as a forest against Macbeth, and, in the final battle, Macbeth is killed by Macduff, a man “not born of woman” in the usual way. Malcolm, the King’s son, is crowned king, restoring the previous order.

 

QUESTIONS

-To what extent is ambition healthy, according to your opinion?

-Do you believe in seers, or in predictions, or in psychics, or in astrologers? Are their predictions always false?

-“Where those birds (martlet, swallow) most breed and haunt, the air is observed to be delicate.” What natural indicators tell us about the air / water quality?

-“[She] could look like the innocent flower, while she was indeed the serpent under it.” Give examples from fiction (or from real life!).

-“She would not have undertaken a deed so abhorrent to her sex.” Are women naturally less violent or cruel than men? Or is it something they learn in their education?

-“[She] began to pour in at his ears words which infused a portion of her own spirit into his mind.” In this case, according to you, who is guiltier, the woman who pours or the man who listens and does what she asks from him?

 

VOCABULARY

Meek, thane, kinsman, heath, swallow, withal, ply, foul, shrink, defiled, rankled, beset, chide, unmanned, sow, gibbet, throbs, recruits, levies, averred, avouches, hell-hound, rabble