FCWWBDNITHBR: The Crane Wife

Today on Fictional Characters Who Would Be Dead Now If They Had Been Real I'm going to try something a little different. Previous entries in this series (which can be found here) have focussed on characters in novels; today, we review a character from myth and song. It's gonna get all bardic up in here.

The Crane Wife is both a Japanese folktale and the title of The Demberists' 2006 album. I will consult the text of emponymous songs of the indie-prog-folk record, and the substance of the Japanese legend. Today, because I've been thinking about it since Gonzales v. Carhart, we'll touch on feminism, and women's roles as productive and reproductive members of the household. Yeah, I know, it's gonna be super exciting.

The story begins when a peasant is out in the woods one snowy evening. He finds wounded crane, an arrow has pierced its wings. Overcome with pity for the beautiful bird, he takes the crane home and nurses it back to health. After it is strong enough, the peasant takes the bird back to the woods and releases it. The bird flies away and the poor man walks home in the snow. The next day a beautiful woman comes to the peasant's cottage. He welcomes her and serves her some meager food and falls in love. They marry and she moves into his cottage. Realizing that household finances are very low and that they might not survive the harsh winter, the wife volunteers to weave silk cloth for sail at the village market. She goes behind a screen and begins her work, warning her husband that he mustn't watch her while she weaves. The husband obeys and every day the wife comes out with a magnificent new garment of brightly colored silk. What the husband does not notice is that every day, the wife's health grows worse and worse.
But by now the money brought into their meager household by the wife's textiles has made them rich merchants. The peasant's greed has become too much to bear and he sneaks into the cottage and behind the screen to see his wife at her work so that he can learn her secrets. He sees, to his shock and horror, a crane--the same crane he found in the forest bleeding on the snow--plucking out its feathers and weaving them into cloth. The crane flew out of the house and into the night and the peasant never saw his wife again. Or, as per the song:

So what are we to make of the fable of The Crane Wife; and more important to the mission of FCWWBDNITHBR, what can we learn from The Crane Wife herself?
I think the first place to look is the intersection of women's work and women's property in traditional societies.

The Crane Wife joins the peasant and forms a household out of gratitude. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the peasant's generosity toward the crane caused her to fall in love. And once a wife she had to contribute to the household. Women's work, the Crane Wife's work is work of the body, it is reproductive, not productive. The husband alienates his labor for income wither in monies or in kind or in reciprocal obligation. His efforts are given away with the expectation of a return that will contribute to house holdings. But the wife is different. Her role is internal to the household and therefore necessarily confers less status. She does not alienate her labor, but rather is in charge of maintaining the household and associated property. Her only asset is herself. And her only social capital is through her husband. Her source of contribution and capital is her body and her most important contribution is the fruit of her body either in children or her role as "manager" to her husband's "owner."

So too The Crane Wife. She contributes through her own body. Her work is not external to the home and thus productive of new resources, but rather internal and reproductive of her self. She recapitulates her marriage every time she makes a new garment by re-sublimating her "true" crane self and instead presenting a thing of beauty and cementing a relationship founded on the suffering of the "true" crane self.

And the lesson. When the peasant man oversteps his bounds, when he seeks to intrude on her feminine sphere, appropriate reproductive resources, and usurp her only source of independent identity within the household, then the spell is broken. The marriage, that is, is broken. And why the resonance with Carhart? Because the privacy of a woman's body and her right to use it as she pleases, to make her own decisions about it--even when it implicates the structure of the whole family--and it's health are among the most ancient rights of civilization and when you (or, say, five old-ass supreme court justices) impinge on that freedom you break one of the basic rules about women: women are in charge of that shit for themselves and nobody else. Appeals to tradition to limit the rights of women to control their bodies are so much hokum--no different than appeals to the tradition of college fraternities, they are "traditions" established by the bourgeoisie in the Victorian era to reinforce more status conscious economic relationships between the sexes.

Basically, the peasant fucked up in the same way that we are currently fucking up here in 21st Century America. His basic assumption was that she, The Crane Wife, as a woman was not competent to make decisions for herself, and instead he had to monitor her activities either for her protection or to gratify his prerogative as the man of the house. This is all rubbish because women are in fact people. And they get to make their own decisions.

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FCWWBDNITHBR: Quentin Compson, Part 2: Fathers and Sons

Alright, let’s try to unpack this a little bit. (I’ll fall short to the task, but it’s got to be done—just a little bit).

Back, way on back, in the ill-lit and musty damp, moth-eaten recesses of the Old Testament, King David has a son (one of many, David got around—that whore) named Absalom. And Absalom had a sister Tamar, who was raped by their half-brother, Amnon. The Bible is pretty fucked up. Absalom takes his revenge on Amnon at a banquet to which all David’s sons were invited. He flees after the murder and returns to his father’s favor only to raise a revolt at Hebron. A successful revolt, until one of David’s spies delays Absalom and David’s armies have time to prepare. And then, “A battle was fought in the ‘wood of Ephraim’ and Absalom's army was completely routed. He himself, having long hair, was caught by his hair in the boughs of an oak-tree, and as David had strictly charged his men to deal gently with the young man, Joab was informed. What a common soldier refused to do even for a thousand shekels of silver, the king's general at once undertook. Joab thrust three spears through the heart of Absalom as he struggled in the branches and his ten armour-bearers came around and slew him.” Bummer. “Absalom, Absalom!” is the cry for lost sons in conflict with their fathers—an ironic conflict born out of filial piety, real or surrogate.

His father abandons some of his liberal pieties and land-owner’s snobbery, while he becomes closer to happiness and family contentment. Quentin’s path is opposite. He looses illusions, affectations, and gains greater understanding of his family, just like Turgenev’s protagonist in Fathers and Sons. But the realizations horrify Quentin, break him apart and stamp upon his self-consciously constructed defenses. He has to leave and go to the university. It leads him to nihilism, the kind of love of nothingness found in the profound suicide. Bazarov, the other nihilist in Fathers and Sons, succumbs to typhus, but a reconciliation of sorts, a closure at his grave occurs with his parents. For his bluster, Bazarov doesn’t wish to die, and something is left. All Quentin leaves behind is a shambles, the long slow road to degeneracy chronicled in Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury.

And what, after all, does The Sound and the Fury signify? Nothing. It is the final last gasp of a dying family, older in its infancy that the piles of woes of the whole of America because the Compsons are older than America. And they were a sorry bunch then. They possessed the upper class dinginess of all proud people gone to seed. Quentin is named after his great-great-great-great grandfather, Quentin MacLachen Compson who fled Scotland for the Carolinas after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1749, and his great grandfather, Governor Quentin MacLachen Compson who would be, “the last Compson who would not fail at everything he touched save longevity or suicide.” Quentin’s ancestors were defeated at every turn and came to embrace their defeats and weaknesses as gamblers, drunks, and degenerates. Even the successful, like Quentin’s grandfather, were notable for their failures (General Jason Lycurgus Compson II, son of the Governor was defeated at Shiloh). And the Compson Mile that is the heart of Quentin’s world was traded from some Chickasaw, for a race horse. No noble land grants, no Southern ideal of gentle aristocracy, it’s all a sham.

Lycurgus is name that crops up on prominent occasions in the Compson line, being the middle name of no less than four Compson men including Quentin’s father, grandfather, and brother. Failures and lost causes dominate these men, from Bonnie Prince Charlie to Shiloh to Quentin’s single year at Harvard (the Compsons can afford no more, his education is a sham of respectability). Each of them attempting to out-do their fathers’ achievements until they realize that their fathers were failures and that they themselves shall fall still deeper. Lycurgus was a Thracian king who tangled with the cult of Dionysus and was driven mad for his troubles. “Going insane, Lycurgus mistook his father Dryas for a mature trunk of ivy, which is holy to Dionysus, and killed him, pruning away his nose and ears, fingers and toes. Zeus, to whom the oak (“dryas” in Greek) is sacred, struck him blind. An oracle then predicted that the land would stay dry and barren as long as Lycurgus was alive, so his people had him dismembered by wild horses. With Lycurgus dead, Dionysus lifted the curse.”


It is in TSatF that Quentin kills himself, succumbs, as Faulkner said, to what he loved most: death. And that is Quentin’s contribution to the family he abandons in the solitude of death, his revelation that the struggle is for naught and to merely decay is to be best in a decaying world. Quentin sees through the falsehoods of “the Southern thing” as only a believer can and he jumps off of the Charles River Bridge in Cambridge after his first year of Harvard, that his father sold some of the Compson Mile to finance. “I don’t hate it,” he says, but he walks to the river and he goes in.

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FCWWBDNITHBR: Quentin Compson, Part 1...Wherein we learn who this person is and by what means he met his tragic end.

Quentin Comspon:

In the last FCWWBDNITHBR I mentioned that the narrator of Moby-Dick, named Ishmael, is so-called because he is a lost son, cast out and finally cast adrift on the salty expanses of the see. Just as the Biblical Ishmael is disfavored by Abraham who turns his fatherly ambitions rather to his son by Sarah, Isaac at the direction of the God of the Covenant, so was our intrepid narrator pushed away into the ocean and finally wracked by Leviathanous Providence and can only give us his outsider’s perspective on the whole world. We have, today, with us in spirit if never true flesh, another cast aside son, another refugee from the world he was born to.

Quentin Compson (on of four so-named individuals in Faulkner’s universe) was born in 1891 and died in June 2, 1910. So he is indeed a Fictional Character Who Would Be Dead Now If [He] Had Been Real.

Quentin is fascinated a repelled at once by the sordid details of his family history as recounted to him in Absalom, Absalom! He is most attracted/repelled by his own father’s intemperance and apostasy, and his sister’s promiscuity. And he is finally disillusioned entirely when he tries to recreate his own personal and family history with his roommate at Harvard, Shreve. Upon seeing the whole picture assembled he realizes that his ideas of honor, tradition, and propriety are so much tinder for the amoral conflagration of Southern History and Compson family disgrace (his sister’s loss of virginity and eventual unwed pregnancy—the child to be named “Quentin”—serves as the focus for this feeling) the already unstable Quentin drowns himself by jumping off the Charles Bridge with his pockets weighted down.

Faulkner jumps around in time so much in his books that Quentin’s suicide doesn’t prevent him from providing the last lines of Absalom, Absalom! When asked by his roommate why he hates the South so much: “‘I don't hate it,’ Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; ‘I don't hate it,’ he said I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!” Yeah…he hates it. But really he hates himself, hates his whole family, hates everything that he believed in that let him down. Graham Greene wrote that if we hadn’t been taught how to interpret the Passion beforehand, it would be easy to decide that Judas loved Jesus and it was Peter what hated the Lord. That’s how thin the line gets between Anger and Love, between Hate and Friendship. In the same way Quentin hates the South because he loves it so much. He denies the South and his feelings about it.

Quentin Compson is a much better written, and much less shallow Holden Caulfield—gifted, sensitive, loyal to his family, but ultimately troubled and lost. Just like Holden, who’s famous denouncement of the “phony” people of the world is act of a secret self-loathing engendered by the thought deep down that he himself is phony, Quentin’s relationship with the South is actually about constituting his own identity and when it falls apart he realizes that he is, himself, nothing of substance and drowns his sorrow, literally.

NEXT in FCWWBDITHBR: Part 2, Wherein we examine what narrative purpose and meaning was served by the invention of Quentin Compson.

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FCWWBDNITHBR: A Prelude to Southern Gothic

Coming up in Fictional Characters Who Would Be Dead Now If They Had Been Real: Quentin Compson from Absolom, Absolom!, and The Sound and The Fury--both by William Faulkner.

I'm only mentioning this ahead of time because now that it's public I have to follow through. I'm weak unless under the threat of public embarrasment.

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FCWWBDNITHBR

Fictional Characters Who Would Be Dead Now If They Had Been Real: The Whale and The Judge


Today: Moby Dick of Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale by Herman Melville, and Judge Holden of Blood Meridian: Or, An Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy. And albino whale and an albino man, each of great size and power, and secret knowledge.

Inside the deep and musty Jungian reaches of the butterfly psyche in the pit of our human selves there is a menacing, chthonic monster that roils and broods its thousand dubious nightmares to fuel the heat of doubts and of fears. And that monstrous semi-deity, that imp of the perverse is the animal side and the cunning, terrible, swift, strong side of us. It shows up all over the place in art and literature. Leviathan—the coiled serpent of the deep—is perhaps the most famous and resonant of its forms, being the one that figured prominently in the Bible as a symbol both of foreboding and of the Wrath of God and also the convenient figure of Hobbes’ meditation on the power of kings and political-economic nature of the emerging nation-state. Folk tradition (though not the text) has Leviathan as the whale that swallowed Jonah. (“Leviathan” is specifically referred to in Psalms, Job, and Isaiah—e.g: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?” Job 41: 1-10). It is of whales and leviathanous monsters human and cetacean that I sing to you today, O weary blog-traveler.

Summaries for each book from the internet—so that we can start off here with a little background, a little common ground:

Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick is an 1851 novel by Herman Melville. It describes the ill-fated voyage of the whaling ship Pequod to find and destroy the eponymous white whale, driven by the obsessive Captain Ahab. The language is highly symbolic and many themes run throughout the work. The narrator's reflections, along with complex descriptions of the grueling work of whaling and personalities of his shipmates, are woven into a profound meditation on hubris, providence, nature, society, and the human struggle for meaning, happiness, and salvation.

Blood Meridian
"The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed." If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power. From the opening scenes about a 14-year-old Tennessee boy who joins the band of hunters to the extraordinary, mythic ending, this is an American classic about extreme violence.


Natural History
The sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) lives as long as 80 years and thus Moby Dick is certainly long dead. Humans (Homo sapiens) live as long as 120 years, though they average around 80 themselves, and so The Judge is certainly dead as well. I point this out because, as you shall see, the characters are dead, but I think that their true-to-life selves are very much alive and even immortal and immorbid for all peoples and times of peoples.

The sperm whale is known to exhibit albinism, and thus white members of the species are real life things, observed by sailors and scientists. And an 85 foot sperm whale attacked the trawler Essex of Nantucket in 1820, splintering the ship and killing all but 8 of her crew: a real-life event that inspired Melville’s tale. Moby Dick is real.

Raiding parties in the American West are no new thing, scalping of Native Americans by bandits was, while not exactly common, not unheard of either. And the inspiration for Cormac McCarthy’s book was the actual gang of raiders helmed by John Joel Glanton operating in Texas and Mexico in 1849 and Judge Holden was a member of that gang. The Judge is real.

The Desert where the Judge is king of terrors and terrorists is the same psychic space as the rolling seas where Moby Dick holds his aquatic domains. Great expanses of salty nothingness; be they the alkali flats of the borderlands or the wine-dark seas and great Ocean themselves. As Melville writes: “The ocean is the dark side of this earth and is two-thirds of this earth.” Just as the mind is mostly unknown, even—especially—to the one whose brain is the mind’s flop-house. No questions asked, payment’s due once a week on Friday. We are mostly saltwater supporting a brain and we are undiscovered country as surely as death because we are death and alkali deserts ourselves.

Melville to McCarthy
“See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire,” begins Blood Meridian, “His folks are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost.”
And the beginning to Melville’s Prologue to Moby-Dick, before even the calling of Ishmael, the cast-aside son: “The pale Usher- threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.” This Usher, this schoolteacher is the source of Melville’s etymology of the Whale and the figurative father of our ingénue-protagonist in Blood Meridian. Still coughing out old grammars and Ovidian poetry to explain the world and birthing and then sending off the innocents onto the plain of vasty violent fields.

Harold Bloom, in the introduction to the most recent edition of Blood Meridian calls that books the fulfillment of the promise of American letters first made by Moby-Dick, and the Judge is heir to the Whale as antagonist.

Melville, it must be remembered was a Yankee in the truest sense. He worked as a customs agent in a sinecure position for a Republican administration and he had shipped with merchantmen in the grandest of Yankee traditions. His was a sharp world, all commerce and politics. When shipping off to the Ocean, he was examining the perversity of human existence. To crawl the underside of the world and wash away his deep entrenched sensibleness. Ishmael’s avowed purpose in setting out is to get away from it all and enjoy the freedom of the waves. But to go a-whaling is to impose commerce and politics on the deep in the form of the moving factory and community of the ship. The Pequod is a piece of Protestant ingenuity out there on the water, owned, even, by two bilious and upright Quaker men. Melville is deconstructing the whole of society and pitting it in a losing battle with the Leviathan. The parallel with McCarthy creeps up again. The scalping party in Blood Meridian is a commercial venture. Rape and murder and the fowl depths of human sin is wrapped up in the pioneer spirit, western expansion, and the expansion of white men’s “morality” into savage wastes. And again the enterprise is corrupted not by its circumstances, but by its purpose. The boy in Blood Meridian is witness and party to great crimes and comes away like Moses down from the mountain. Seeing God, not in His wrath alone, but in His glory. Just as Ishmael ends, the cast away son of a lost tribe.

Metaphysics
It is simple to say that Judge Holden is the Devil. It is not wholly inaccurate and neither is entirely the case. Just as Moby Dick is an evil thing, our White Whale is not entirely the devil, nor the Prince of Lies, Flies, or any other product of the infernal pit. But rather it is part of his natural-ness that makes him evil, or at least seem so. The terror of Moby Dick is the terror of the Leviathan, the terror of the deep. There is, in him, the capacity to make madmen of sober New Englanders and to gaze back at you from the abyss. Moby Dick is elemental and powerful, a Gnostic force, a representation of the all-wide natural world that we do not know nor understand nor have plumbed inside and out our hardened carapaces of logic and faith. They are the creations of the Old Testament God, that blind and mad creator of the Albigensian heresy. They are the angel/devils that intercede for the God of the Covenant and enforce his terrifying order. They are part of that order.

If Moby Dick is the Leviathan in Job, then Judge Holden is that Satan that sups with God and makes friendly sport with Him in (and of) Job. And as natural creatures of the world they are both subject to and exemplary of its laws. They are the natural law, the true order of things and not this Novo Ordo Seclorum that Enlightenment and government and the US and Europe promises. This attitude is what makes Melville and McCarthy Romantics, though like Faulkner between them, dark and pitiless Romantics, in awe out of necessity and not pleasure (like those English panty-wastes).

The Judge is a scientist, and ruthless exposeur of the natural order in the face of human comforts about civilization and religion:

“In the afternoon he sat in the compound breaking ore samples with a hammer, the
feldspar rich in red oxide of copper and native nuggets in whose organic lobations he purported to read news of the earth’s origins, holding an extemporary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat. A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The Judge smiled.
Books lie, he said.
God don’t lie.
No, said the Judge. He does not. And these are his words.
He held up a chunk of rock.
He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.
The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.”

He knows the workings of God’s mind and he lives out their terrible truth and lectures on their secrets. His rationality, his science is not liberating, it is his means of destroying the world and corrupting those in it. He is death, destroyer of worlds.

Moby Dick destroys the floating world of the Pequod with his bulk not out of wrath, because Leviathan is not a creature of wrath (rather it executes the wrathful will of the universe), but because it is there and that is its purpose: to strip away the civilized and make us part of the natural order. Moby Dick is the subject and object of wrath, the wall against which the whole of humanity bangs its head and asks why there is evil? and what can be done for the children? The answers are: You, and Nothing. The Whale is the agent of the universe in its least compassionate aspect:

“Retribution, swift vengeance, and eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled.”

What is the Whale to men and men to the Whale? Melville answers us:

"The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men fell eating in them…That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning…deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, and all mutilated against it…all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the Whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and the, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

Red in tooth and claw.

The Judge advances finally on the Kid for his last revelations: that he is not safe, never was innocent of anything, and never shall be free. In the end the Wale and the Judge are immortal. Never dead or dying they haunt the salt-wastes now, inside and out. "He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."

Immortal and terrible and true, our twinned subjects are a pair of demons. If not the Devil in his guises, they are the genius of man and the awesome promise of power and fear. They are what is waiting in the dark and from which we cannot turn: "In that sleep and in sleep to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing." Indeed, "Towards thee [we] roll thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last [we] grapple with thee; from hell's heart [we] stab at thee; for hate's sake [we] spit [our] last breaths at thee," there is no other.

This is really worth someone’s thesis. I’m sure someone has done. So I’ll end it and leave you with the final bit. The Whale and the Judge are not really the antagonists in their respective novels. Rather, they are the consequence of the world that the characters inhabit. They are aginst nobody, for none concern them save those other ones interfere in their own terrible just purpose. The antagonists are the leaders of the ventures, the spread of so-called civilization devoid of justice: Ahab the mad captain, and Glanton the scalper. Truly then we have met The Enemy, faithful readers, and he is us. Our albino subjects have merely held the mirror, obligingly and with toothy grins.

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Pre-FCWWBDNITHBR hype.

So in the slow-to-start-yet-on-going project of FCWWBDNITHBR I have decided to up the ante, both personally and for you, the reader. Sometime in the next few days (hopefully tomorrow) I will tackle a two-fer: Moby Dick and The Judge. I couldn't find a good way to write about them seperately, so I'm doing 'em 'agither. Plus, that makes a Herman Melville double-header thus absolving me of examining his other characters for a vary long time. Also, if you haven't, go ahead and read Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian in the next few days.

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Fictional Characters Who Would Be Dead Now If They Had Been Real.

The very first FCWWBDNITHBR (a.k.a Feckwebednithber) is Bartleby, the Scrivener.

Bartleby is the eponymous chracter in the Herman Melville short story. "Scrivener," was the occupational name for the men that used to copy out legal documents before the advent of carbon paper or Xerox. (For example, if you had just licensed the sale of $100,000 worth of goods on your behalf by a second party, you would want both that second party and yourself to have accurate copies of the licensing contract.) Bartleby works in a Wall Street law firm--a fate dreadful to behold, and one which I have studiously avoided. And he would prefer not. Or rather, his anser to everything is that he "would prefer not." He shuts down a Wall Street house with those simple words, he cries the cry of the oppressed and the put upon office worker with his comically simple and comically reasonable statement. There's more to be said. That's why I provided the link above. It's a short story. Literally. So read it.

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