The Little Professor

I love electronic databases! Even when we can't afford any of them!

Talk about fortuitous coincidences: Julia Gergits' "Created in Their Image" (IHE) appeared just one day after James McWilliams' "Technology and Tenure" (the NYT Freakonomics blog). Gergits examines how working at a regional comprehensive affects one's professional profile, especially when it comes to research and publishing; McWilliams suggests that, given the rise of electronic resources, perhaps it's time to intensify tenure requirements for the non-science types.  Noting that his access to a specialized database had turned up all sorts of "obscure references," McWilliams comments that "while I think there are many downsides to relying too heavily, or exclusively, on this form of research, there’s no doubt that it allows the engaged scholar to pursue questions in a much more streamlined (and inexpensive) manner."  Ergo, he cautiously argues, "I think there’s a case to be made that a university’s tenure demands should keep pace with technological advances."  Of course, McWilliams also admits in passing that his access to said specialized database wasn't quite legit: he "gained access through the account of a close friend who works at an institution with ivy on the walls."  

This argument, when taken alongside Gergits' (quite good) essay, reinforces my suspicions that the New Golden Age of Electronic Research, far from subverting, transgressing, or doing any of those other popular verbs to the boundaries between Those Folks at R1s and Those Folks at Other Places, may well shore them up.  My library does not subscribe to any of the major primary text databases in my field.  Nor, at present, does it subscribe to all of the bibliographical resources I need to use, like the most recent incarnation of the RHS bibliography.   (Needless to say, there was dancing in the streets when we at least managed to get our hands on Project Muse.)    This could be because, well--let's just make a random guess, shall we?--we don't have the money to do this.   (Actually, that's not a random guess: I used to be the department's library coordinator, and I know we don't have the money.)  There is only one Ph.D. granting institution in the area, the University of Rochester, so if we're desperate, we can trek over there--although, in fact, they don't have that many subscription-only databases, either (my early modernist colleagues can get their hands on EEBO, at least).  In other words, unless something is available online for free, I have no easy way of getting my hands on it.  (Of course, I could always--wait for it--travel.  Which kind of does in the savings, there.)  If we're thinking about possible discrepancies between a scholar's profile at My Sort of Place and a potential job at a R1, then "let's hike publishing requirements!" only accelerates the discrepancies in question. 

In and of itself, that's not an argument against McWilliams' position.  However, as Gergits points out, R1s and comprehensives are already split when it comes to the very definition of scholarship.  For example, as she notes, textbooks, which "garner little respect on the national academic market, count as scholarship at YSU: they require research and careful writing, and they can have a huge impact on the field through guiding and directing students."  (In the past, I've pointed out that there's much more freedom at a comprehensive like mine to write whatever actually interests you, which is how I've come to specialize in authors nobody else has ever read.  The flip side:  people ask me why on earth I'm writing about such things.)  Obviously, schools with more $ will fund more research that involves spending $--I'm not railing at this state of affairs.  But I am railing at attempts to discuss the New Golden Age of Electronic Research in ways that do not acknowledge how localized that Age is currently proving to be.  Yes, we have more free stuff; we also have lots more stuff that only a few, relatively well-funded colleges can purchase.   Somehow, I don't think piggy-backing on somebody else's account is going to be the approved wave of the future. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House, 2009).  In 1974, a high-wire performance frames the stories of several New Yorkers.  (BOMC)
• Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (Routledge, 2009).  Part of the "New Critical Idiom" series.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Johns Hopkins, 2009).  Analyzes how and why readers are drawn into fictional lives, using both traditional and more recent analytical methods (including cognitive approaches).  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)
• Alessandra di Luzio, ed., The Grand Tour Lives On (CLUEB, 2006).  Literary, historical, and art-historical studies of post-Grand Tour travels and responses to (primarily) Italy.  (Addall)
• Leslie Howsam, Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain, 1850-1950 (U of Toronto, 2009).  History's markets and the marketing thereto.  (Amazon [secondhand]) 

A Monster's Notes

Although neo-Bronte, neo-Austen, and neo-Stoker novels are relatively high-profile publishing phenomena, a number of writers have also been revisiting Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, ranging from Dean Koontz and Elizabeth Hand to Peter Ackroyd and Laurie Sheck.  In its approach to Frankenstein, Sheck's A Monster's Notes is about as far away from a novel like Jane Eyre's Daughter as one could possibly imagine: not a prequel, sequel, or conventional rewriting ("what really happened"), A Monster's Notes offers a nonlinear, virtually plotless meditation on Frankenstein as a literary work--its form, themes, images, even individual words.  Understandably, it has inspired some mimetic commentary.    (As reviewer Ron Charles rightly points out, "[t]he jacket flap tries to dress up the book in the clothing of a coherent story, but the title offers complete truth in advertising: This is indeed a monstrous collection of notes.")  The Monster is the narrator, an almost all-seeing eye who appears to Mary when she is a young girl, reading books to her as she sits by Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's grave.  But he also watches Claire Clairmont and Henri Clerval as they read, write, and translate.  And relays Mary Wollstonecraft's apparently posthumous letters to William Godwin.  And, in our present, moves unnoticed through both depersonalized urban landscapes and depopulated monasteries, searching Google as he goes.  "Time meant nothing to me," the Monster tells us.  "Past, present, future, all wrapped up as one" (413).   As narrative time and space appear to fold in on themselves--along with the very distinction between fictional and real characters--the Monster's relation to Frankenstein and its author becomes increasingly opaque.

As other readers have pointed out, the novel most obviously invokes Frankenstein in its use of the fragment.  Like the Monster, the novel is sutured together entirely out of scraps, detached from their original textual "bodies."    Some of the chapters are essentially commonplace books, such as those quoting chunks of traveler's narratives; others are cobbled together out of the Monster's Google searches.  The letters that make  up most of the novel are frequently scarred with strike-outs, or simply unfinished.  This fragmentation extends to books within the novel, like the Dream of the Red Chamber, or the mangled works that the Monster reads to Mary.  Frankenstein itself most frequently appears as decontextualized phrases, or even single words--the Monster sees the editing process, the interplay between Mary and Percy's verbal and stylistic choices, but not the story in its entirety.  For that matter, the Monster normally perceives the people in his own story as incomplete fragments, usually hands.   That "story" also remains stubbornly fragmented: there is no conclusive end to any of the narrative threads (and, since Mary Wollstonecraft is apparently speaking from beyond the grave, it's not clear what an "end" might be), and the novel, like Bleak House, stops on an open-ended dash.  

To counterpoint this endless cracking and shattering, Sheck "stitches" the narrative together with echoes--frequently repeated quotations, allusions, images.  For example, the Monster's observation about "[p]ast, present, future," which I quoted above, also appears courtesy of Claire Clairmont (in multiple contexts) and Albert Einstein.  Again, in the Monster's first set of notes, he muses on the adjective "fragile,"  a word which then recurs in Claire's, Mary's, and the leprous Friend's prose.  References to ice, to hands (the novel's dominant image), to wounds, to eyes, to the colors red and white, to glass--all these and many others seep through what we might expect to be the boundaries separating each narrative voice.  Each speaker, as the Monster somewhat hazily and partially perceives them, turns out to be some fractured aspect of every other speaker.  Yet if only from the sheer length of the novel--just over five hundred pages--these textual stitches keep pulling apart; the reader can do her best to compose the fragments into a unified whole, but the narrative resists such comfortable reassembly. There's as much decomposition here as composition.

Part of the decomposition effect derives from the novel's dismantling of the epistolary form.  Claire Clairmont continues writing letters to Fanny Imlay even after Fanny commits suicide, while Clerval writes letters to his unnamed friend that he never intends to mail.  In turn, Clerval receives his friend's increasingly fractured letters all at one go, without ever learning if his leprosy has finally killed him.  Mary writes to Claire, but receives no response.  Mary Wollstonecraft, as I've said, "writes" to William, even though she appears to be dead.  The only consistent reader of these letters, other than their own writers, is the Monster.   Unlike, say, Pamela, where Pamela's letters eventually cohere into an instructive narrative, the asymmetrical correspondence in this novel is almost entirely one-sided, sent out into the ether--or not sent out at all--without any hope of response.  And yet, each writer feels impelled to make the initial gesture.  Apostrophizing Cao Xueqin, Clerval admits that "[n]o matter how much I translate I can never come close to you or know you"; even so, he goes on, "there are so many things that draw me close even as I feel this unbridgeable gap" (233).  This tension between the desire to know and the consciousness that such knowledge will never be possible also exists, it seems to me, in the novel's epistolary structure: each character writes (in friendship, anger, self-exculpation, and so on) to another, extending a hand (to borrow the novel's favorite image) in friendship or rage, but there is never a moment of reciprocal recognition.  Only the Monster, reading this interrupted circuit of communication--much as he spies on the De Lacey family in Frankenstein--can identify the missed connections, but even so, his reading primarily consolidates his emotional exile. Certainly, as the New Yorker would have it, "in the last pages, a being without identity cowers in a squalid room, hunting the Internet for a trace of its creator."

Interestingly enough, there's one text the Monster refuses to reread: Frankenstein's notes, frequently referenced but never quoted.  This novel virtually eliminates Victor Frankenstein from the equation, reducing him to his hands (the hands that Victor himself curses in the original novel): "Yet I'd glimpsed your hands before you fled, knew mine looked like yours.  I couldn't know then how you'd made me out of pieces  of dead things, discarded things--only sensed I was something embodied whose one clear task was to continue to exist" (10).   Although the Monster returns to this moment of origin more than once, it eventually becomes unclear if this origin is actually the origin, if Mary Shelley's more lurid fantasies of fabricating him don't actually bring him into existence.  Instead of the unread laboratory notes, we have Mary Shelley's notes, which are themselves frequently written over by Percy Shelley; in that sense, Frankenstein-the-novel has the same "stitches" as the Monster, composed as it is not only by multiple hands (literally--the Monster keeps seeing their hands writing and rewriting), but also out of the Monster's own fragmentary notes, dropped on the ground during the Monster's meetings with the child Mary, and Mary's perhaps unconscious allusions to her mother's writings.  By the end, it's difficult to draw the line between original and copy, corpse and newborn, author and translator.  Like the novel's sense of time, all of these things double back upon themselves, change places.  "Who's the reader?" the Monster asks on the novel's penultimate page.  "Who's the listener?" (519)

Linking about: Pepper's Ghost

• A brief biographical sketch of John Henry Pepper, the "celebrity chef of Victorian science."
• Strictly speaking, the effect was invented by engineer Henry Dircks.
• The Pepper's Ghost effect on the nineteenth-century stage.
• Another account. 
• A more technical explanation of how it works.
• In the context of cinema history.
• Ghosts as a fairground attraction.
• The illusion created with more recent technology.
• A twenty-first century response, by Australian artist Keith Tucker.  
• How the illusion is used at the American Museum of Natural History.
• Probably the most famous current example of Pepper's Ghost in action: the grand hall at Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Jesse Bullington, The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart (Orbit, 2009).  It's fourteenth-century Europe, and the brothers Grossbart are just making a living...by robbing the dead.  (Lift Bridge)
• Marlene van Niekerk, Agaat, trans. Michiel Heyns (Tin House, 2010).  Translation of a novel first published in Afrikaans in 2004. In the 1990s, an aging white woman farmer from South Africa needs the help of her longtime servant, Agaat, to survive.  (Lift Bridge)
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (Anchor, 2000).  Anglo-Irish families try to ignore the Troubles on their front doorstep.  (eBay)
• Annabel Davis-Goff, The Fox's Walk (Harvest, 2004).  Set in Ireland right before the Easter Rising.  (eBay)
• Molly Keane, Queen Lear (Penguin, 1990).  King Lear in mid-twentieth century Ireland.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• John Barth, Letters: A Novel (Dalkey Archive, 1994).  Epistolary novel, first published in 1979, in which "Barth" corresponds with his own characters.  (Lift Bridge)
• Churchman's Magazine 48-49 (1891-92).  Anti-Catholic and anti-Ritualist periodical, published by the propagandist John Kensit.  (eBay)
• The Church Monthly: An Illustrated Magazine for Home Reading 12 (1899-1900).  An Anglican periodical.  (eBay)

In which I am utterly confused

A box of Playstation 2 video games arrived in my departmental mailbox this afternoon.

I don't play video games.  (I sometimes watch playthroughs of video games, which is not the same thing.)

I don't have a Playstation, 2 or otherwise.

I didn't order these games.

I don't know the person who sent them to me (from Athens, GA).

There's no receipt. 

This is not the sort of random mailing I generally receive, to put it mildly.

If you are this person, um...thank you? But what's going on here?

Jane Eyre's Daughter

After doing yet more work to Book Two, I felt the need to plunge, yet again, into the apparently unending stream of Bronte prequels, sequels, and biofictions.   Elizabeth Newark's Jane Eyre's Daughter (2008; first published under a different title in 1997) is, as one might reasonably expect, about Jane Eyre's daughter, Jane, better known to her loved ones as Janet.  The novel moves briskly through her early life at the rebuilt Thornfield, with her adored father Edward, somewhat distant mother Jane, and apparently beloved elder brother Oliver.   Young Janet, we discover, is a fine pianist, with her mother's talent for sketching and her father's for riding horses wildly across the moors.  Things change (and the real plot begins) once Janet turns sixteen: Jane, Rochester, and Oliver decide to trek off to Jamaica, leaving Janet to attend a finishing school run by none other than Jane Eyre's Miss Temple.  Several irritations and minor mishaps later, including various run-ins with Isabella Ingram (Blanche Ingram's daughter), Janet leaves school to live with grumpy Colonel Dent and dreamy Roderick Landless--the latter bearing an amazing and suspicious resemblance to Rochester, so much so that a baffled Janet says "Father?" the first time she runs into (or, rather, over) him (89).  Janet soon becomes attracted to the brunette and taciturn Roderick, but she also succumbs to the fascinations of the blond and rakish Sir Hugo (whose sister seems oddly jealous about the whole affair).  In the meantime, Janet and her companion Laura try to figure out if Colonel Dent has someone locked up in another wing of the house.  This being a romance, of course, Complications soon ensue: there are rumors about Roderick's true parentage (now, why does he look so much like Rochester?), and Sir Hugo soon reveals himself to be not just a would-be rapist (cue Janet's Heroic Escape), but also...drumroll please...his sister's incestuous lover (um, ick?).  Nevertheless, this still being a romance, the novel ends with the nasty people sent far away, the nice people married, and the mystery of the locked wing happily set to rest.

Newark adopts one of the most common narrative strategies for a novel like this: Janet frequently winds up reliving her mother's autobiography, spiced up with occasional references to other novels in the Bronte canon.  As a child, Janet discovers her mother's "manuscript in an antique desk, seldom used, in my father's library," and finds in it something of a key to her mother's somewhat forbidding character (xvi).  Soon, Janet's life fills with echoes of her mother's: being sent off to Miss Temple's school; encountering the second generation Ingrams; dealing with a disapproving, unbending (albeit male) guardian; living in a house where certain rooms are kept ominously secret; alluding to harems; and even enjoying a moment of telepathic communication.  Even Janet's first encounter with Roderick Landless replicates her mother's first encounter with Rochester, albeit in reverse--it's Janet who nearly tramples Roderick with her horse.  Meanwhile, we occasionally stumble across names drawn from Wuthering Heights ("Nellie") and Villette ("Paulina Fanshawe," combining two characters), while Roderick himself--"a gypsy, with my black hair and my skin brown from the sun"  (177)--resembles Heathcliff.   The novel's very title announces how Janet's identity as a character depends on her mother's pre-existing narrative: like Jane  Eyre's Daughter itself, which authorizes its own existence by returning to the familiar original, Janet works her way through these skewed replications of her mother's "autobiography" in order to find her authentic identity.  Or so it would seem.

Although the novel does its best to eviscerate Jane Eyre's Gothic mode, the Gothic creeps in through Janet's budding, and buddingly incestuous, sexuality.  The adolescent Janet, fascinated by her father's and mother's still-sexually passionate relationship, cannot help fantasizing about Rochester: "What was it like, I wondered, to share my father's bed, to be held by those strong, muscular arms close to him throughout the night, so safe, so cherished?" (xxiii)  For young Janet, suffering from a shortage of available men, Rochester becomes the logical love object of choice.  In terms of narrative structure, then, when the novel separates Janet from her parents for several years, it does so in order to shift Janet's desires from Rochester to his spitting image, Roderick.  And yet, incest creeps in once again, for Janet finds out that Roderick may well be Rochester's illegitimate child, and thus her half-brother.  ("How Byronic," the reader comments.)  The dark double of Janet's sternly thwarted incestuous desires is the consummated relationship between Hugo and his sister, Alicia, which also echoes the relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights.  Near the end, an anguished Alicia warns Hugo "my own, beloved brother, my twin soul, my demon lover, you cannot treat me thus" (247).   Janet's choice, in effect, lies between the wild, self-absorbed, destructive passions of Wuthering Heights, or the erotic, yet idealized domesticity of Jane Eyre.  For all that the novel has been retitled Jane Eyre's Daughter, in fact, the true problem is that she is Rochester's daughter--Rochester, her romantic ideal, reincarnated in a man who appears to be his carbon copy.  (One is tempted to suggest that this type of literary knockoff might count as a form of textual incest...)   When Jane and Rochester ultimately re-enter the novel, however, Janet realizes that her father is "growing old" (284), and that although she had "thought him [Roderick] a true copy of Edward Fairfax Rochester in shape and size, that was not the case.  My father, a Colossus to his worshipful daughter, was not in truth a giant" (285).   Daddy is safely domesticated, to be replaced by his virile and much younger...nephew.  Janet cannot marry her father, but she can marry a younger, handsomer, and taller first cousin--and thus have her mother's relationship to Rochester all over again (summed up in a paragraph repeated from the prologue, no less).  Success in life, apparently, means duplicating your mother's fairy-tale romance.  Without the inconvenient blinding and maiming, of course.

In fact, one of the oddest things about this novel is just how much trouble it has with Jane Eyre.  Let's trot out the Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian Novels. Unlike Jane, Janet is a static character who rapidly sheds any self-doubt she might possess.  Early on, Janet rebels against the unfair treatment meted out by a harsh teacher, Miss Nasmyth, and is never punished for it; instead, we are expected to admire her behavior, just as we are supposed to share Roderick Landless' enthusiasm when Janet haughtily tells off the elderly Colonel Dent (which she does more than once!).  There's Rule #3: this novel is gung-ho for "Socially Unacceptable" behavior when it comes to the heroine.  Gone are Jane Eyre's careful negotiations between permanent moral law and mere "convention."  Gone with them is religion, for, in a bit of convenient retconning, we discover that Rochester didn't actually convert at the end of Jane Eyre, and Janet--her father's daughter--has no religious belief whatsoever.  But the very first thing we hear in the novel is a clergyman denouncing women from the pulpit...which, I believe, takes us to Rule #2.  Presumably, Janet's total lack of religiosity correlates with her appropriately unacceptable (and therefore independent) behavior, even though Jane Eyre's independence derives from her faith.  In addition, Janet and Laura are immediately taken with Parvati, Colonel Dent's secret Indian grandchild, and vice-versa, which announces the entry of Rule #4.  (Janet's supposed non-racism is about as plausible in this setting as her willingness to snipe at her elders...which is to say, not at all.)  And, of course, the bad guy, while not Jack the Ripper, has a Dark Secret, so Rule #5 also comes into play.  In fact, the nasty Miss Nasmyth is the subject of "odd rumours" (29) herself (there appear to be limits to Janet's progressivism).   Once Janet reaches the age of sixteen, she has nothing important to learn about moral action and deliberation; unlike Jane, she achieves no new self-consciousness, and her romantic reward effectively depends on her refusal to change.  

Five things I would like my students to know about scholarship

1.  There is no such thing as a research project without dead ends. 

2.  Don't be surprised when your findings turn out to be...surprising.

3.  The past tends to be inconvenient.

4.  Light bulbs can go off even when you're reading a scholar whose approach you find utterly uncongenial. 

5.  If the literary work doesn't behave as your theory of choice tells you it should, then by all means, say so.  Nobody brought literary theory down from the mountain.   

Pedagogical observation of the day

It's very difficult to teach "The Eve of St. Agnes" when no-one in the room wants to say "sex." 

Triple-Decker Blogging, Vol. III: The Inquisitor

...And the plot fizzles out completely, but perhaps that's a case of unintentionally mimetic structure: like every novel about the Italian Reformation, the narrative is ultimately about failure, and fail it does.  By story's end, the Inquisition has conquered Ferrara, the Duchess Renee has returned to Catholicism (albeit while disclaiming the "Roman" bit [III:131]), Madonna Ponte and the blind widow are both dead, and the Rosettis are in exile.  Gilbert continues to ride herd on Roman Catholicism's anti-family program: Oriz tells the Duchess that "[i]n the eyes of God they [her daughters] are not your children" (III:124), and successfully uses the threat of permanent separation in order to persuade the Duchess to recant.  Moreover, Gilbert tells us in a brief flash forward near the end, Renee's "unnatural son" expels his now-unrecanted mother from Italy when she refuses to re-recant (III:275); the Inquisition itself gains its foothold by a "system of espionage" (III:267) that turns children against parents, and vice-versa.  As usual in anti-Catholic fiction, Roman Catholicism functions by atomizing the household, upsetting the proper structures of domestic authority and displacing "natural" affections with an improper allegiance to the institutional church.  It's not accidental that the happiest part of the ending resides with the Rosettis, who once again form a united Protestant household.

Still, there is something resembling a plot twist: Camille Gurdon turns out to be none other than the rather ironically named Father Felix, a Dominican in disguise.  Obviously, this  does not presage well for future romantic possibilities.  In fact, Gilbert here draws on another common trope of anti-Catholic fiction, the (usually) disguised Catholic priest who falls in love with the woman he (also usually) has been asked to convert; this trope crops up in novels like Mrs. Trollope's Father Eustace: A Tale of the Jesuits, C. G. H.'s Constance Lyndsay, and Caroline Snowden Whitmarsh Guild's The Sisters of Soleure.  Such unintentional romances signal the "unnaturalness" of celibacy, for the priest cannot resist the call of love and desire once exposed to the right woman.   Romance plots will out.   The result, however, is always negative, either because the priest realizes his error (and dies), or because the priest is revealed to be a perverted villain (and dies).   Camille/Felix falls into the perverted villain category: he urges Teresa to lie during an interrogation, then lies to her father when reunited with him, and finally falls off a bridge during a (providential) storm.  Thus, the romance plot fails along with the usually comic plot of the Reformation. 

Camille/Felix's disguise nevertheless contributes to one of the novel's better-developed themes, that of the morality of disguise in the face of persecution.  This has already come up in Ochino's protective costuming and Gerolamo's pragmatic reconversion; now, we also find the Duchess similarly returning to Catholicism because her love for her daughters exceeds "my attachment to the Protestant creed" (III:134).  By contrast, Teresa--despite her lunkheadedness in the second volume--consistently maintains "silence" in the face of every query, refusing to identify herself or to reveal her father's whereabouts to the Inquisitors.  This passive resistance, the novel insists, is the only moral option. Thematically, it's also a significant option, because the novel dwells on the Inquisition's skill at acquiring and utilizing knowledge; Teresa's repeated refusals to speak frustrate a system built largely on eliciting the right words from those it oversees.  Nevertheless, The Inquisitor also takes the easy road by refusing to martyr Teresa.  Instead, there's a deus ex machina liberating her from prison, rewarding her silence by refusing her death.  For all intents and purposes, then, it's the novelist vanquishing the Inquisition, not the heroic woman (who is released just before being tortured).

Oriz, the eponymous Inquisitor, himself undergoes a bout of providential punishment when he suffers a stroke.  Before that, however, he suffers a mental breakdown that manifests itself in a "terrible unremembered dream" (III:204), accompanied by a daylight hallucination of a face whose "stern anger" is obvious, even though the "features" cannot be seen (III: 204).  The Inquisitor, the master of information, implodes by losing access to his own subjectivity, thanks to the dream that can never be narrated.  Here, the Inquisition's fiction of transparency breaks down, for the master Inquisitor becomes opaque to himself, beyond anyone's power to help; Teresa's powerful refusal to speak thus mutates into a punitive inability to do so.  At the same time, Oriz's paranoia reflects the Inquisition's own elaborate spy network back upon its architect.  In a way, the novel privatizes Oriz's punishment by pathologizing it: given the ending, there is no official mechanism in place for granting Oriz his "just deserts," and so he must be trapped inside his increasingly warped mind and body.