Month: June 2010

Best of ‘Novel Readings’: James Wood, How Fiction Works

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

This review first went up in March 2008. My brooding over deep vs. broad reading has had me thinking again about Wood’s criticism, which I wrote admiringly about when I first discovered him in 2007. (This remarkably belated discovery speaks volumes, I think, of the divide between academic and public criticism.) I have also been thinking a lot about Becky Sharp, because in an essay for the July issue of Open Letters Monthly I lay out a more elaborate version of the argument I touch on here for her incidental significance to the novel in which she is so captivating a heroine. Both lines of thought led me back to take another look at this piece. I haven’t kept up with all of Wood’s reviews since, mostly because he and I often choose different books to pay attention to, but when I do (as with his recent piece on David Mitchell) I’m still struck by the elegant erudition of his language and analysis. Still, as this review shows, I have some sympathy with Lauren Elkin’s proposal that Wood is “a fine specimen of a book reviewer” but not exactly a “literary critic.” Not, as they used to say on Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that.

How Fiction Works was also very ably reviewed in 2008 in Open Letters Monthly, by Dan Green of The Reading Experience.

The dust jacket describes How Fiction Works as Wood’s “first full-length book of criticism.” Anyone led by this blurb to expect sustained analysis supported by extensive research and illustration will be disappointed, as in fact How Fiction Works turns out to be essentially a ‘commonplace book,’ a collection of critical observations and insights of varying degrees of originality and sophistication, developed with varying degrees of care and detail. Wood acknowledges having set deliberate limits on his project, likening it in his introduction to Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, proposing to offer practical “writer’s anwers” to “a critic’s questions,” and admitting (though with no tone of apology) that he used only “the books at hand in [his] study.” To some extent I agree with other reviewers who consider it only fair to evaluate the book Wood wrote, rather than regretting he didn’t write another one. Yet even within the parameters Wood sets, I think there are grounds for wishing he, with his exceptional gifts and qualifications as both reader and critic, had not sold himself (or us) short in fulfilling them. Further, beginning with the invocation of Forster but going well beyond it, the book has pretensions to grandeur: for instance, also in his introduction Wood remarks that Barthes and Shklovsky “come to conclusions about the novel that seem to me interesting but wrong-headed, and this book conducts a sustained argument with them” (2). With gestures such as this, Wood claims an elevated stature for his critical contribution that is undermined by its casual construction and over-confident approach to scholarship. Though How Fiction Works provides many further proofs of Wood’s critical gifts and considerable erudition, I think it also proves that even the best practical critic flounders when working only with what he has already to hand or in mind.

Right off the bat I was irritated by the book’s structure. Wood has said that he felt liberated by using the numbered “paragraphs” or sections, but allowing yourself to skip from thought to thought in this way means letting yourself off the hook too often. Frequently in the margins of my students’ work I write “And so? Finish the thought!” One effect of crafting, first paragraphs, and then longer pieces as sustained wholes is that in working out the overall movement of your ideas and building in appropriately specific transitions, you confront both the logic and the further implications of your claims: the form pressures you to think better. Numbered bits, however, relieve that pressure: you can just stop with one topic and start the next, and as long as they are more or less related, you can claim to be producing a unified whole, even if you are only papering over gaps. In How Fiction Works, the breaks often seem unnecessary: a new number sets off what is really just the next sentence in the idea already unfolding. Most of the time, however, they are substitutes for careful transitions. They allow a certain stream-of-consciousness effect to creep in: that last bit reminds me of this exception to a general principle, or of a writer who also does that, or of another favourite excerpt, or of a time I went to a concert with my wife. Well, OK, I guess, and no doubt it would have been much more difficult to do a coherent chapter offering a theory of, say, fictional character, realism, or morality and the novel. And I suppose it’s true that non-academic readers don’t want the kind of detail and complexity such a full account of these topics would require. Even so, the numbered bits felt lazy to me. The footnotes too had an aimlessness about them. Some of them covered ideas or examples that seemed no less important to their chapter than most of the bits allowed their own numbered section (note 53 on p. 150, to give one example) while others appeared entirely unnecessary to the book (note 40 on p. 121, or note 41 on p. 124, for instance).

The TLS reviewer objects to Wood’s “grace notes”: “It is sometimes hard to distinguish a gasp of admiration for another’s skill from the contented sigh when the books in one’s study satisfy one’s own theories.” I shared this reaction, not least because “how fine that is” (139) is an expression of taste, not criticism. But Wood is a compelling reader of details, even passages. It’s when he makes broader assertions that he leaves himself more open to objections. For one thing, he has some governing assumptions about what fiction is for that he treats as universal rather than historically or theoretically specific. In his chapter on “Sympathy and Complexity,” for instance, as a footnote to his remarks on fiction as a means of extending our sympathies (the occasion for one of his shockingly few references to George Eliot!), he adds this:

We don’t read in order to benefit in this way from fiction. We read fiction because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on,–because it is alive and we are alive. (129)

Well, maybe, but not everybody, and not all the time: for instance, most of the Victorian critics I have been editing for my Broadview anthology [now that the anthology is actually out, I wonder if Wood would like a copy–maybe I’ll send one along!] would not have recognized this highly aestheticized motive for novel reading. Is it fair, or even sensible, to say that they were simply wrong? Or to ignore how the formal developments of the Victorian novel furthered ends not adequately respected by Wood’s post-Jamesian formulations? His is in many respects a teleological account of the history of the novel. “Progress!” he exclaims after a quotation from Proust: “In Fielding and Defoe, even in the much richer Cervantes, revelation of this altering kind occurs at the level of plot” (125). But were Fielding and Defoe trying to do what Proust did and failing? How much better we might understand them if we allow them what James calls their “donnee.” “It is subtlety that matters,” he declares in his chapter on character; “subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure”: “I learn more about the consciousness of the soldier in Chekhov’s The Kiss than I do about the consciousness of Becky Sharpe [sic] in Vanity Fair.” But Becky Sharp’s consciousness is surely not the point of Vanity Fair; indeed, I argue in my own lectures [and now, in my essay in July’s Open Letters] that too close a focus on Becky risks diverting us from Thackeray’s grand gesture of holding the mirror up to ourselves, so that the novel becomes an opportunity for us to reflect on our own morality and mortality. “Was she guilty or not?” the narrator asks–and, remarkably, will not tell us, because ultimately she is not the point but the occasion, the device. Thackeray is not a failed Chekhov any more than Dickens is a failed Flaubert. To Wood, “the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style” (58), but that history is partial and often distorting.

About the operations of free indirect discourse and the importance of knowing who ‘owns’ which words, on the other hand, Wood is typically astute. Here’s one place where examples from Middlemarch would have served him well, though at the risk of undermining his generalizations. Consider this passage from Chapter 1, for instance:

And how should Dorothea not marry? — a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers. A young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles — who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship. Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Think how much is lost on a reader who improperly identifies the source of that word “naturally”–or the last two sentences altogether!

Wood is good on the telling detail as well as the quality he calls “thisness”: “any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability” (54). But again, when he moves into prescription, he becomes less persuasive, as when he objects to the “layer of gratuitous detail” in 19th-century realist fiction. Again, the challenge is in defining “gratuitous” (as, clearly, Wood himself is well aware), but he can’t propose any principle except, perhaps, his idea that “insignificant” details avoid irrelevance if they are “significantly insignificant” (68). After recounting an incident in which he and his wife had “invented entirely different readings” of a violinist’s frown at a concert, he claims that a “good novelist would have let that frown alone, and would have let our revealing comments alone, too: no need to smother this little scene in explanation” (72). Again, well, maybe. I can imagine at least one “good novelist” who might have done great things with their “different readings” of that little moment, perhaps even using their “revealing comments” as a chance to reveal even more about perception and reality as well as human relationships (“these things are a parable…”). Doesn’t it depend on what your novel is about and on the formal methods you are using to realize those goals?

I’d like to return before I close to the “Sympathy and Complexity” chapter, because this is a topic close to my heart, one on which I have spent a lot of my own critical energy recently, and one I expected Wood to handle particularly well. “Perfunctory” is the best word I can think of to describe it. I’ve mentioned already his dehistoricizing assumption that “we” don’t read in order to receive moral benefits. I doubt this is true in practice, and I also question the separation he implies between moral and aesthetic readings. Here is a case in which even a little research outside “the books at hand in [his] own study” would have immeasurably enriched his discussion: Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep, for instance, would have helped him complicate exactly that separation. And the conversation about how fiction might do “what [Bernard] Williams wanted moral philosophy to do” (135) has many participants besides Williams: Martha Nussbaum comes promptly to mind. Further, not all novels avoid providing “philosophical answers”; he replicates Nussbam’s error in generalizing about “the novel,” but as a professional novel reader, he should know better.

Here the hybrid character of How Fiction Works proves a genuine weakness, I think. This chapter is not a full, responsible, or authoritative inquiry into its subject. Of course, it does not pretend to be (remember, the book promises only “a writer’s answers” to “a critic’s questions”). But then how should we evaluate it? Doesn’t Wood do even his non-specialist audience a disservice by taking up complicated subjects on which there already exists a rich body of scholarship and offering his own fairly casual observations with the confidence of real expertise? What a much greater contribution it would be to distill that complex material and present it accessibly! To grab what’s at hand and say just what comes to mind bespeaks an enviable but also problematic degree of confidence. And while the non-expert reader is in no position to object, the expert reader is easily deflected with the excuse that she is not the intended audience…

After I read How Fiction Works I re-read some of my collection of Wood’s essays, including his reviews of Never Let Me Go, Saturday, and Brick Lane. This is really wonderful stuff, as I have remarked before; I admire it wholeheartedly for its critical acuity, its literary elegance, and its moral seriousness. But considering How Fiction Works strictly as one among many books about books (and Wood is wrong, or perhaps disingenuous, when he says “there are surprisingly few books” of this kind about fiction [1]), I think there are many better choices available. I continue to recommend David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction, for instance, which takes up many of the same topics as Wood, though under a less grandiose umbrella of prescriptive claims. I think it’s an exciting development that Wood has landed a job in Harvard’s English Department. In taking this now unconventional route from journalism to the academy, he is following in the footsteps of many eminent Victorian critics (David Masson, for instance). But considering how bitterly difficult it is for those following the established professional route to land any academic job at all, it’s frustrating to think that he may not be held to anything like the same standard of rigour as many critics far less lauded and applauded. Here’s hoping that he has more books in him as good as The Broken Estate.

(Original post cross-posted to The Valve.)

Summer Reading Plans

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

With everything done but the marking in my class, I can now look ahead to July and August and ask myself what any self-respecting English professor inevitably asks: What will I be reading?

Actually, I recently spent a friendly evening with several other English professors and the question they asked me was “How do you ever find time for all that reading?”–which is an interesting question, when you think about it. It does rather imply that I’m reading when I should be doing something else, or at least I’m reading instead of doing something else, namely, whatever it is that they are doing. Or, to refine that insinuation somewhat, it implies that my reading isn’t the same as their reading. Perhaps what they really mean is “How do you ever find time to read so much for fun?” or “to read things that aren’t obviously for your research.” Or maybe it just means “You must be neglecting your garden/family/knitting/TV watching/sleep”  (to which the responses are, in order, yes (but my husband does a great job of it) / no, I’m pretty sure not / yes, definitely, and my quilting too / yes, pretty certainly, but after you have children you come too regard sleep as a rare luxury anyway).  Perhaps they just meant it as a compliment  (“Wow, you read a lot–good for you!”), or perhaps they suspect me of speed-reading! Probably, really, they didn’t mean much by it at all, and the fact that it has obviously made me feel defensive means that I have projected my own anxieties about how I use my time onto them–which I shouldn’t do to my friends!

Still, they got me thinking, not for the first time, about the relationship of my “leisure” or non-required reading to my work and professional life. It’s true that I never, ever pick up a book of academic literary criticism anymore to read just out of interest. Reading of that sort is strictly occasional for me now, meaning that I do it only when the occasion demands–when I’m either studying up on something I’m going to teach for the first time, or the first time in a while, or working on a specific research project. But I don’t think the other reading I do is strictly irrelevant. For instance, I’ve ended up teaching as well as developing research projects based on books I initially read initially “only” for my own interest. Without defining relevance quite so narrowly, too, it just seems right that someone whose job it is to talk to students about literature and perhaps even to put it into some meaningful relationship with their own lives should be an active, curious reader including of some currents in contemporary writing. I make a big deal in my classes about the texts we are reading, which come in such uniform and sanitized packages (no offense, OUP, Penguin, Norton, or Broadview-they’re beautiful and extremely useful editions!), but which were never intended for quite that kind of safe consumption–writers write to stir things up, whether social, political, aesthetic, sensual, or theoretical things. Reading widely, if miscellaneously, helps me sustain an interest in literature as that kind of living and purposeful venture, and I think that reading enhances–it certainly motivates–my classroom time as well as (of course) my own life. The diffusion of my reading attention, though, has in recent years made me less and less patient with the kind of deep, burrowing reading that academic research requires. I’m more and more aware of what I haven’t read, despite all that I have read, and I feel frustrated that the kind of reading I have done (still do) in deliberate pursuit of professional goals (scholarly articles and books) has been at the expense of the kind of broad reading experience that would give me the knowledge and confidence to write a different kind of criticism. And yet, I do have professional responsibilities, and even, maybe, a lingering interest in getting that last promotion, so for those reasons I need to remain a disciplined reader; and I do learn from and sometimes even enjoy the ‘work’ reading I do.

So, with these different priorities (reading deeply or reading widely), what will I be reading this summer?

One possibility that I feel, somewhat sadly, is slipping away from me is The Tale of Genji. When I learned of the summer project being co-hosted by Open Letters Monthly and the Quarterly Conversation, it was just before the beginning of my class, and at this point I’m about 200 pages behind. Though I am enthusiastic about the project in principle, and have been keeping an eye on the interesting and lively posts at its blog site, I fear I can’t catch up and keep up now without abandoning the other books I already had marked as summer prospects. Chief among these is War and Peace, which I’ve been yearning after for some time–so you see why I find adding Genji a difficult prospect. But I do have it from the library, and I have made a start on it, so we’ll see how that goes. I’m also just at the beginning of Margaret Oliphant’s The Perpetual Curate, as a further effort in the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge, and I’m finding it sharp and amusing so far, making it an attractive prospect to stick with it and finish it. I also need to read Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, as one of my MA students is writing a chapter on it; so far, it’s not nearly as alluring a read as The Perpetual Curate (leading me to sympathize with James Wood’s remark that “when Woolf fails it is generally when she is being Victorian”). Still, duty calls! Rereads are also in my future, as I try to, at last, get my Ahdaf Soueif paper into form for submission to a peer-reviewed journal; I’ve been thinking of expanding it from In the Eye of the Sun to include comparative analysis of The Map of Love. On my TBR pile I also have Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, William Volmann’s Europe Central, A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book, Azar Nafisi’s Things I Have Been Silent About, Hilary Mantel’s The Giant O’Brian, and Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood–tempting, all! Plus I haven’t finished the Hermione Lee biography of Woolf, and I recently picked up several second-hand copies of Woolf’s diaries and letters, which at the very least I would like to spend some concentrated time browsing in. Finally, I am still thinking about the whole ‘books of my life’ idea that came to me towards the end of my recent rant about getting away from metacriticism and on with finding my own critical voice, and the book I would most like to write about, if I can figure out how, is Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field, so I will be reading that again, along with Gaudy Night, another of my top picks for that category.

Hmm. I still haven’t mentioned any scholarly books. I’m sure there will be some! But I doubt I’ll learn more, or even as much, from any of them as I’ll learn from finishing War and Peace.

This Month in My Class and Other Updates: Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

A long, long time ago, I noted that I was about to begin teaching an intensive spring session course…oh, wait, it was only four weeks ago! And tomorrow is our last class meeting before the final exam. As Archdeacon Grantley would say, Good Heavens! As I said then, “the pace is relentless . . . and it all goes by in what seems like a flash”–and it certainly has gone by with amazing speed and intensity. We’ve read and discussed Pride and Prejudice, Scott’s “The Two Drovers,” Jane Eyre, Gaskell’s short stories “Lizzie Leigh” and “The Old Nurse’s Story,” A Christmas Carol, and Silas Marner. Though at times during class discussion I did regret not having done bigger books (with Dickens, especially), for the time we actually had between class meetings this did seem like plenty to read, as the students were also completing (and therefore I was also reading and evaluating) daily reading responses and two other writing assignments. Also, though at times I regretted having signed up for another of these mad romps, overall it still suits me better to be teaching than not. I was lucky in my students, too, the large majority of whom seemed keen and participated energetically and intelligently pretty much every day.

I hoped that being under some pressure and on a regular work schedule would be good for my reading and blogging. That turned out to be somewhat optimistic (you may have noticed a couple more posts from the archives–though I always meant that to be part of establishing myself at this new address, so it wasn’t altogether a sign of being overwhelmed with other business.) As for my reading, I did complete The Antiquary and write about it for the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge (you should also look at the posts on it at Wuthering Expectations–between us, I think we did it justice–and it is indeed uncanny how allusions to the darn book do crop up once you’re noticing them, as in a review of Silas Marner from which I was reading to my students just yesterday, quite unsuspecting that once again, the Mucklebackit cottage would come up as exemplary of how to write about simple folk without diminishing them). I sneaked in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop, too, before things got too crazy (and it appears to be the case that The Blue Flower, which I take to be her best, or at least most highly acclaimed, novel, is not currently in print, at least in Canada? can this be true?).

Last night I also finally managed to finish the only other book I’ve been able to read any of during the course, which is Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black. It’s a very strange, grimly comic, discomfiting book. A bit hesitantly, I do recommend it, even if (like me) you are a complete skeptic about psychic phenomena of all kinds. Mantel has an astonishing ability to compel my belief in her stories–and her versatility is astonishing as well, as I can’t think of anything about Beyond Black that gives it away as being “by the author of Wolf Hall,” or “by the author of A Place of Greater Safety,” for that matter. You’ll get an idea of the book’s flavor from this remark, by her “sensitive,” Alison, who is impatient with the reiterated questions she gets about proof:

Why should people come through from Spirit for other people who don’t believe in them? You see, most people, once they’ve passed, they’re not really interested in talking to this side. The effort’s too much for them. Even if they wanted to do it, they haven’t got the concentration span. You say they give trivial messages, but that’s because they’re trivial people. You don’t get a personality transplant when you’re dead. You don’t suddenly get a degree in philosophy. They’re not interested in helping me out with proof.

“You don’t suddenly get a degree in philosophy”–I love that. And poor Alison should know, as the spirits (if that’s even the right word) that she deals with are spiteful, even vengeful, dirty-minded, low-humored, or else vaguely pathetic, lost and confused about their situation. When her pale assistant Colette, in a panic, begs for advice on what to do if she dies, Al’s advice is hardly spiritual in the sentimental way we might casually expect:

Don’t start crying. Don’t speak to anyone. Don’t eat anything. Keep saying your name over and over. Close your eyes and look for the light. If somebody says, follow me, ask to see their ID. When you see the light, move towards it. Keep your bag clamped to your body–where your body would be. Don’t open your bag, and remember the last thing you should do is pull out a map, however lost you feel. If anybody asks you for money, ignore them, push past. Just keep moving towards the light. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t let anyone stop you. If somebody points out there’s paint on your coat or bird droppings in your hair, just keep motoring, don’t pause, don’t look left or right. If a woman approaches you with some snotty-nosed kid, kick her out of the way. It sounds harsh, but it’s for your own safety. Keep moving. Move towards the light.

It’s as if the afterlife is a tube station at rush hour, crammed with people equal parts lost, desperate, and treacherous. Al’s spirit guide is an offensive low-life named Morris, who (we gradually learn) was (is?)  intimately connected with Alison’s childhood traumas, which include sexual abuse and mutilation (to oversimplify). I don’t think Mantel is setting up her story of the other side simply as a projection of memories and feelings from this side: though there is some cynicism mixed in about the possible chicanerie among the ranks of the mediums or psychics themselves, and about the neediness and self-absorption of their clients, that some people are “sensitive” to disembodied presences is a reality in the novel, worked out in a wry spirit of ‘what if…’ What if people are just as self-interested and emotionally needy after they pass over? What if they retain some capacity to interact with the living world? What if they can find you, or follow you, and annoy you, no matter where you go to hide? What if the pressure of their intrusions and demands makes you ill and exhausted? On the night of Princess Diana’s death, for instance, Alison is reduced to “rocking herself and groaning” from the shockwaves to her sensitivities. But Mantel shuns pathos: when Diana “manifests” to Alison, she’s lost her glamour but retained a quality of peevish entitlement:

“Give my love to my boys,” Diana said. “My boys, I’m sure you know who I mean.”

Al wouldn’t prompt her: you must never, in that fashion, give way to the dead. They will tease you and urge you, they will suggest and flatter; you mustn’t take their bait. If they want to speak, let them speak for themselves.

Diana stamped her foot. “You do know their names,” she accused. “You oiky little grease spot, you’re just being hideous. Oh, fuckerama! Whatever are they called?”

“Give my love to . . . Kingy. And the other kid. Kingy and Thingy,” she says as she begins to fade away, “melting away to nothing,” Alison thinks, “to poisoned ash in the wind. . . . Al implored her silently, Di, don’t go. The room was cold.”

The constant emotional battering is exhausting, debilitating. If that’s indeed what it’s like being receptive to messages from the beyond, you might find yourself, as poor Alison does, standing in your own hallway yelling “What testicles?” to a recalcitrant spirit. Though I had some sympathy for Colette (‘”That’s it,” she says. “I don’t intend to spend another night under this roof. How can I live with a woman who has rows with people I can’t see, and who stands outside my bedroom door shouting ‘What testicles?’ It’s more than flesh and blood can stand”), it’s tormented Alison, unable to separate her present from her past, who earned my compassion, as she seeks understanding and perhaps relief from her haunted life:

Back and back. There is an interval of darkness, dwindling, suspension of the senses. She neither hears nor sees. The world has no scent or savour. She is a cell, a dot. She diminishes, to vanishing point. She is back beyond a dot. She is back where the dots come from. And still she goes back.

Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

From the Novel Readings Archive

3 Quarks Daily has just announced the winners in their 2010 Prize for science blogging, judged by Richard Dawkins. Congratulations to all the nominees, and especially to the finalists and winners. I think 3QD is doing a great thing by drawing attention to the high quality of writing that can be found on blogs: it’s still too common to hear people being dismissive of the form, rather than attentive to the content. The challenge, of course, is filtering through the overwhelming number and variety of sites, something that events such as these 3QD competitions can really help with. It’s a remarkable thing that so many people write so well and so passionately about so many subjects and share their work so freely.  I submitted my post on Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost to the 3QD Arts and Literature competition earlier this year because, as I said at the time, “the book absolutely topped my list of notable reads last year, because writing about it as well as I could was important to me, and because I was reasonably satisfied that I had said what I wanted to about it. Also, one of my most trusted readers wrote me to say that she thought it was the best thing I’d ever written on my blog.” I’m proud that my post was selected as a finalist.

“So many people know these horrible stories by now,” Daniel Mendelsohn reflects near the end of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; “what more was there to say? How to tell them?” The Lost itself is, of course, his answer.

This extraordinary book, at its simplest level, is a more or less chronological account of Mendelsohn’s quest to learn the fate of his great-uncle Schmiel (Sam) Jager, his wife Ester, and their four daughters, Lorka (b. 1920), Frydka (b. 1922), Ruchele (b. 1925), and Bronia (b. 1929?). From early in his childhood Mendelsohn knows where his relatives lived, in the Polish town of Bolechow, and he knows that they died during the Holocaust, but beyond this he has only fragments of information, from stories half-heard or half-understood (“Once, I overheard my grandfather saying to my mother, I know only they were hiding in a kessle. Since I knew by then how to make adjustments for his accent, when I heard him say this I simply wondered, What castle?”), from photographs (“killed by the Nazis,” his grandfather has written on the back of a photograph of Schmiel in his WWI uniform, brought by Daniel to school for a presentation to his Grade 10 history class: “I remembered what had been written because I so clearly remembered the reaction to those words of my high school history teacher, who when she read what my gradnfather had written clapped a hand to her handsome, humorous face, . . . and exclaimed, ‘Oh, no!'”), from letters (“The date of Onkel Schmil and his family when they died nobody can say me, 1942 the Germans kild the aunt Ester with 2 daughters,” writes his Great-Aunt Miriam from Israel in 1975).

Only once he makes it his mission to fill in the gaps in his knowledge does Daniel realize, over the course of many years and many interviews with surviving “Bolechowers,” in America and Australia, Israel and Denmark and Poland, that he “knew” almost nothing. Indeed, The Lost is in large part a meditation on what nobody knows, what nobody can know: not just the facts, what happened to Schmiel and Ester and their daughters (“such darling four children,” Schmiel writes in 1939, in one of his desperately dignified letters to his American relatives, asking for money and help to get his family “away from this Gehenim,” this Hell), the facts of their deaths, but also their lives. Who were they, these six people, now almost as lost (as Mendelsohn ruminates near the volume’s close) as the many millions who, before them, lived and were lost into what is now history? What can we really know of them, or say about them?

For everything, in time, gets lost: the lives of people now remote, the tantalizing yet ultimately vanished and largely unknowable lives of virtually all of the Greeks and Romans and Ottomans and Malays and Goths and Bengals and Sudanese who ever lived, the peoples of Ur and Kush, the lives of the Hittites and Philistines that will never be known, the lives of people more recent than that, the African slaves and the slave traders, the Boers and the Belgians, those who were slaughtered and those who died in bed, the Polish counts and Jewish shopkeepers, the blond hair and eyebrows and small white teeth that someone once loved or desired of this or that boy or girl or man or woman who was one of the five million (or six or seven) Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin, and indeed the intangible things beyond the hair and teeth and brows, the smiles and frustrations and laughter and terror and loves and hunger of every one of those millions of Ukrainians, just as the hair of a Jewish girl or boy or man or woman that someone once loved, and the teeth and the brows, the smiles and frustrations and laughter and terror of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust are now lost, or will soon be lost, because no number of books, however great, could ever document them all, even if they were to be written, which they won’t and can’t be; all that will be lost, too . . . everything will be lost, eventually, as surely as most of what made up the lives of the Egyptians and Incas and Hittites has been lost. But for a little while some of that can be rescued, if only, faced with the vastness of all that there is and all that there ever was, somebody makes the decision to look back. . . .

And of course that is what Mendelsohn himself has done, to look back, to see “not only what was lost but what there is still to be found.” Though his initial interest is in just how his lost relatives died (“we did end up finding out what happened to Uncle Schmiel and his family–by accident,” he tells us early on), his preoccupation becomes something at once more expansive and more elusive: their lives, their experiences, their identities–what they lost, in becoming no longer “themselves, specific” (“I was reminded the more forcefully,” he says at a crucial moment of discovery, “that they had been specific people with specific deaths . . . they were once, themselves, specific, the subjects of their own lives and deaths”) but only six of six million, lost in the sheer magnitude of the loss of which their own deaths were specific only to them.

Mendelsohn’s refusal to take over their specificity, to presume to know them or speak for them, for me was one of the most impressive features of the book. Even when he reconstructs likely scenarios, he frames them with a respectful uncertainty. How presumptuous, after all, to think we can stand, vicariously, in the place of his sixteen-year-old cousin Ruchele, killed in Bolechow’s first official Aktion. “I have often tried to imagine what might have happened to her,” Mendelsohn remarks, “although every time I do, I realize how limited my resources are.” Not only is the evidence fragmentary and unreliable, not only can “memory itself . . . play tricks,” but “there is no way to reconstruct what she herself went through.” Still, he tries, drawing on his own interviews with survivors and witnesses but also from documents in Yad Vashem, but never presuming to know what was really only Ruchele’s knowledge (“It is indeed possible that,” “if she survived those thirty-six hours,” “with what thoughts it is impossible to know,” “Did she hear it? . . . We cannot know.”) “That is the last we see of her,” he says at the end of this section; “although we have, of course, not really seen her at all.” The sense of loss at this point is acute: the waste, the horror, the mystery, the finality of death.

These and the many other, often quite extended, meditations on the limits of our historical knowledge risk bringing a degree of narrative self-consciousness to The Lost that could turn it too far towards Mendelsohn himself. If the book had become more about the storytelling than the stories, I would have liked it far less, but I never felt that the humanity of his family was put second to intellectual gamesmanship or philosophical speculation. Even the long sections of biblical exegesis are woven, always, into his thinking about what might have happened, what it all might have meant or be made to mean, what larger (cyclical, universal) stories these individual stories might in their own ways reiterate. There are high stakes involved in his project, and his insistence that it matters how much we know, where our information comes from, how we piece it together into something meaningful–the effort he puts into questioning or undermining or revising what he learned during his interviews and travels–keeps alive for us that history is made as well as lived by human beings whose complexity cannot be reduced and should not be underestimated. Not that he is a relativist about truth: it matters deeply to him to reach as close as possible to what really happened to Schmiel and Ester and their daughters. The moments at which he comes physically closest take on a special poignancy because as he stands there–for instance, in the kestle, box, not kessle, castle, where Schmiel and Frydka hid for months, and “the material reality” allows Mendelsohn “to understand the words at last”–he is most sharply aware he will never know, really: “those lives and deaths belonged to them, not me.”

Early in the book Mendelsohn points out that “it is naturally more appealing to readers to absorb the meaning of a vast historical event through the story of a single family.” Such, clearly, is the strategy of this book. And yet we are often reminded, because Mendelsohn too is often reminded (sometimes, deservedly, harshly), that in focusing so exclusively on six of six million, others whose lives were equally “specific” are being sidelined, turned into secondary characters. He interviews Jack Greene, “born Grunschlag,” who once dated Ruchele:

I can tell you, he began, that Ruchele perished on the twenty-ninth of October 1941.

I was startled, and immediately afterward moved, by the specificity of this memory.

I said, Now let me just ask you, why–because you remember the date so specifically–why do you remember the date?

As I wrote down Ruchele–>Oct 29 1941, I thought to myself, He must have really loved her.

Jack said, Because my mother and older brother perished on the same day.

I said nothing. We are each of us, I realized, myopic; always at the center of our own stories.

There is no way, of course, to include every story, but Mendelsohn’s strategy of frequently spiralling away from the “main” narrative, following memories and anecdotes as they come into his mind or come from those he is interviewing, is a constant reminder that each story we do hear is one branch on a vast spreading tree. The sheer scope of the horror and loss would be overwhelming even if it were possible to represent it all, so instead we get glimpses, again and again, so that like Mendelsohn himself, though we are focusing on the Jagers, we can never forget that there were many, many others–or if we do, we are soon chastened:

As I looked I suddenly felt foolish for asking Mrs Begley to look in her book [of the victims] for my relatives, whom I never knew and who meant something rather abstract for me at that point, when so many of hers, so much closer to her, were there too. . . .

Then she took a breath that was also a sigh, and started telling me her own stories of slyness and survival, and other stories, too. Of, for instance, how, successfully hidden herself, she had bribed someone to bring her parents and in-laws to a certain place from which she would take them to safety, . . . and how when she arrived at this rendezvous she saw a wagon filled with dead bodies passing by, and on top of the pile of bodies were those of the elderly people she had come to rescue. . . .

And then she added this: Because she herself was in danger, was “passing” at that point, she couldn’t allow herself to betray any emotion when she saw the bodies of her family passing by in the wagon. . . .

Mrs Begley’s story of “passing” (You see, I was fair, and I spoke German) points to another issue Mendelsohn confronts, as a researcher and storyteller: all those he interviews are, necessarily, survivors. So not only do they (like Mrs Begley) all have remarkable stories of their own to tell, of hiding and running and starving, of those who helped them, or didn’t, but they also could not have been witnesses (“Had he seen [Ruchele] being taken? I stupidly questioned. He laughed grimly. If I would have seen her, I would have been dead too!“). One of Mendelsohn’s aunts, asked by her inquisitive relation for details of her own birth, replies, “I’m not going to tell you when I was born because it would have been better if I’d never been born“, and we realize that though the survivors were not lost in the same way as Ruchele and Frydka and Schmiel and Ester and Lorka and little Bronia, still, they lost everything they had and are lost as well. “‘Well,'” says Jack Greene, “‘think of Bolechow. Of six thousand Jews, we were forty-eight who survived.'”

Kind Words: Thackeray Reviews A Christmas Carol

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Here’s a bit of Thackeray’s review of A Christmas Carol from Fraser’s Magazine (1844):

Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness. The last two people I heard speak of it were women; neither knew the other, or the author, and both said, by way of criticism, ‘God bless him!’ . . . As for Tiny Tim, there is a certain passage in the book regarding that young gentleman, about which a man should hardly venture to speak in print or in public, any more than he would of any other affections of his private heart. There is not a reader in England but that little creature will be a bond of union between the author and him; and he will say of Charles Dickens, as the woman just now, ‘GOD BLESS HIM!’ What a feeling is this for a writer to be able to inspire, and what a reward to reap!

Considering that Thackeray and Dickens were widely viewed as rivals for the public’s affection and admiration (“Dickens and Thackeray, Thackeray and Dickens!” David Masson begins a comparative essay on the two novelists  in 1851), and that they wrote (as Masson details) in completely different styles, these comments strike me as marvellously warm and generous. Would any ‘leading’ contemporary novelist rise to the occasion in this way if a rival, and one with wholly different aesthetic principles, wrote a smash hit, I wonder? (Is it possible, also, to conceive of any book being received today as a “national benefit”?)

Gaskell, “The Old Nurse’s Story”

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I’m in the thick of my summer course: it’s hard to believe that we’ve already covered Pride and Prejudice, “The Two Drovers,” and Jane Eyre. I have a great group of students–they seem very engaged and a significant proportion of them are contributing with gusto to class discussion. But the assignments are starting to come in, so it may be a bit quiet around here for a bit. In the meantime, let me recommend Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story,” one of our texts for tomorrow, for your reading pleasure. Here’s a teaser:

And the great frost never ceased all this time; and whenever it was a more stormy night than usual, between the gusts, and through the wind, we heard the old lord playing on the great organ. But, old lord, or not, wherever Miss Rosamond went, there I followed; for my love for her, pretty helpless orphan, was stronger than my fear for the grand and terrible sound. Besides, it rested with me to keep her cheerful and merry, as beseemed her age. So we played together, and wandered together, here and there, and everywhere; for I never dared to lose sight of her again in that large and rambling house. And so it happened, that one afternoon, not long before Christmas Day, we were playing together on the billiard-table in the great hall (not that we knew the way of playing, but she liked to roll the smooth ivory balls with her pretty hands, and I liked to do whatever she did); and, by-and-by, without our noticing it, it grew dusk indoors, though it was still light in the open air, and I was thinking of taking her back into the nursery, when, all of a sudden, she cried out:

‘Look, Hester! look! there is my poor little girl out in the snow!’

I turned towards the long narrow windows, and there, sure enough, I saw a little girl, less than my Miss Rosamond dressed all unfit to be out-of-doors such a bitter night, crying, and beating against the window-panes, as if she wanted to be let in. She seemed to sob and wail, till Miss Rosamond could bear it no longer, and was flying to the door to open it, when, all of a sudden, and close up upon us, the great organ pealed out so loud and thundering, it fairly made me tremble; and all the more, when I remembered me that, even in the stillness of that dead-cold weather, I had heard no sound of little battering hands upon the window-glass, although the Phantom Child had seemed to put forth all its force; and, although I had seen it wail and cry, no faintest touch of sound had fallen upon my ears. Whether I remembered all this at the very moment, I do not know; the great organ sound had so stunned me into terror. . .

The full text can be found here or here.

The Antiquary: A Treasure-house of Details, But an Indifferent Whole

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I finally finished reading Scott’s  The Antiquary, the first of my commitments for the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge. As some of you will have recognized, my title for this post is actually a line from Henry James’s review of Middlemarch. I have quoted that line often, usually as evidence of James’s failure (or refusal) to acknowledge or appreciate the extraordinary and beautiful convergence of idea and form in that great novel, but also to make the point that James’s idea of wholeness was simply quite different from Eliot’s, partly by design. He had to make his own way, after all. I am quite prepared to blame my own failure to appreciate The Antiquary as a “whole” on my own failure of understanding, my own inability to grasp the motivating or unifying idea of this odd novel. After all, I’ve read it only once, and that with difficulty. I’ll be happy to improve my reading, if only retrospectively, with the help of other people’s insights into its particular merits. (Amateur Reader–I’m counting on you here!)

I settled on The Antiquary for this project because it came highly recommended. Here’s an excerpt from one of Virginia Woolf’s letters:

I don’t know [Scott] accurately and minutely as you do, but only in a warm, scattered, amourous way. Now you have put an edge on my love, and if it weren’t that I must read MSS…I should plunge–you urge me almost beyond endurance to plunge once more–yes, I say to myself, I shall read the Monastery again and then I shall go back to Midlothian. I can’t read the Bride [of Lammermoor], because I know it almost by heart: also the Antiquary (I think those two, as a whole, are my favourites).

Then there’s this famous passage from Eliot’s “The Natural History of German Life”:

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage, or tells the story of “The Two Drovers,”–when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of “Poor Susan,”–when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw,–when Hornung paints a group of chimney-sweepers,–more is done towards linking the higher classes with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions–about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses; but it isserious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily-laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of the true one.

Eventually, I’ve always known, I probably had to get to Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage myself, and Woolf’s endorsement seemed to clinch the deal.

As it turns out, Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage is well worth a visit, if only for this exchange:

“Ay, ay,” answered Luckie Mucklebackit, “I see you hae gotten a’ your braws on; ye’re looking about for Steenie now—but he’s no at hame the night; and ye’ll no do for Steenie, lass—a feckless thing like you’s no fit to mainteen a man.”

“Steenie will no do for me,” retorted Jenny, with a toss of her head that might have become a higher-born damsel; “I maun hae a man that can mainteen his wife.”

“Ou ay, hinny—thae’s your landward and burrows-town notions. My certie!—fisherwives ken better—they keep the man, and keep the house, and keep the siller too, lass.”

“A wheen poor drudges ye are,” answered the nymph of the land to the nymph of the sea. “As sune as the keel o’ the coble touches the sand, deil a bit mair will the lazy fisher loons work, but the wives maun kilt their coats, and wade into the surf to tak the fish ashore. And then the man casts aff the wat and puts on the dry, and sits down wi’ his pipe and his gill-stoup ahint the ingle, like ony auld houdie, and neer a turn will he do till the coble’s afloat again! And the wife she maun get the scull on her back, and awa wi’ the fish to the next burrows-town, and scauld and ban wi’ilka wife that will scauld and ban wi’her till it’s sauld—and that’s the gait fisher-wives live, puir slaving bodies.”

“Slaves?—gae wa’, lass!—ca’ the head o’ the house slaves? little ye ken about it, lass. Show me a word my Saunders daur speak, or a turn he daur do about the house, without it be just to tak his meat, and his drink, and his diversion, like ony o’ the weans. He has mair sense than to ca’ anything about the bigging his ain, frae the rooftree down to a crackit trencher on the bink. He kens weel eneugh wha feeds him, and cleeds him, and keeps a’ tight, thack and rape, when his coble is jowing awa in the Firth, puir fallow. Na, na, lass!—them that sell the goods guide the purse—them that guide the purse rule the house. Show me ane o’ yer bits o’ farmer-bodies that wad let their wife drive the stock to the market, and ca’ in the debts. Na, na.”

“Aweel, aweel, Maggie, ilka land has its ain lauch.”

The Antiquary of the title, Jonathan Oldbuck, is a tedious windbag: imagine Waverley‘s Baron of Bradwardine turned protagonist and given free run of the novel, and you have some idea. Of course, he has moments of dignity and a heart of gold, the latter manifested particularly through his steadfast loyalty to his friend and long-time antagonist Sir Arthur Wardour but also through his inexplicable, immediate and unshakeable attachment to the young man Lovel whose mysterious identity becomes the creaky hinge of a fearsomely predictable long-lost-heir plot. Appreciating Oldbuck’s virtues means enduring his endlessly reiterated benevolent misogyny, something I’m sure we are supposed to grin and bear because obviously he doesn’t really hate “womankind.” But he and Lovel and Sir Arthur and the dashing but dull Hector M’Intyre and the conniving German ‘adept’ Dousterswivel and even the surprisingly melodramatic Elspeth, are all just laboring cogs in the unwieldy plot of the novel. To be sure, there’s some intrinsic interest in the Antiquary’s monologues about historical relics, etymologies, and so forth (if you like that kind of thing, well, this is the kind of thing you’ll like), and though dramatizing pedantry is a risky aesthetic strategy, Scott’s dry humor bathes Oldbuck in an affectionate glow that almost (but not quite) redeems the concept. I enjoyed the walk to poor Steenie Mucklebackit’s funeral, for instance, when poor Hector rushes off to wrestle a seal to escape his uncle’s pronouncements on the “funeral rites of the ancient Scandinavians.” There are some other pretty funny bits: the sneezing ghost sequence, for instance, and the anticlimactic non-invasion of the French. There’s some pathos, too: the funeral itself is recounted with a wonderful balance between the parents’ grief and the communal rituals that recognize it and begin the process of healing it. The minister may have the improbable name of ‘Blattergowl,’ but his anxiety about approaching the stricken mother is strikingly rendered:

The minister next passed to the mother, moving along the floor as slowly, silently, and gradually, as if he had been afraid that the ground would, like unsafe ice, break beneath his feet, or that the first echo of a footstep was to dissolve some magic spell, and plunge the hut, with all its inmates, into a subterranean abyss.

But what greatness there is in the novel seems to me highly concentrated in the character of the ‘mendicant’ Edie Ochiltree. He strides through the novel with his own unique dignity and resonance, his rootlessness giving him a particularly mobility which enables him then to mediate between the many forces and systems at play. Edie seems privy to some kind of fundamental knowledge, as well: not a ‘wise fool’ (he’s too explicitly savvy for that), he nonetheless carries the moral force of someone who sees through the inessentials.  Here I’m indebted to Adam Roberts, who through the magic of Twitter picked up my puzzlement about The Antiquary and pointed me here, where he quotes G. K. Chesterton, as he says, “at length”:

These, I say, are two roots of democratic reality. But they have in more civilised literature, a more civilised embodiment of form. In literature such as that of the nineteenth century the two elements appear somewhat thus. Tragedy becomes a profound sense of human dignity. The other and jollier element becomes a delighted sense of human variety. The first supports equality by saying that all men are equally sublime. The second supports equality by observing that all men are equally interesting.

In this democratic aspect of the interest and variety of all men, there is, of course, no democrat so great as Dickens. But in the other matter, in the idea of the dignity of all men, I repeat that there is no democrat so great as Scott. This fact, which is the moral and enduring magnificence of Scott, has been astonishingly overlooked. His rich and dramatic effects are gained in almost every case by some grotesque or beggarly figure rising into a human pride and rhetoric. The common man, in the sense of the paltry man, becomes the common man in the sense of the universal man. He declares his humanity. For the meanest of all the modernities has been the notion that the heroic is an oddity or variation, and that the things that unite us are merely flat or foul. The common things are terrible and startling, death, for instance, and first love: the things that are common are the things that are not commonplace. Into such high and central passions the comic Scott character will suddenly rise. Remember the firm and almost stately answer of the preposterous Nicol Jarvie when Helen Macgregor seeks to browbeat him into condoning lawlessness and breaking his bourgeois decency. That speech is a great monument of the middle class. Molière made M. Jourdain talk prose; but Scott made him talk poetry. Think of the rising and rousing voice of the dull and gluttonous Athelstane when he answers and overwhelms De Bracy. Think of the proud appeal of the old beggar in the Antiquary when he rebukes the duellists. Scott was fond of describing kings in disguise. But all his characters are kings in disguise. He was, with all his errors, profoundly possessed with the old religious conception, the only possible democratic basis, the idea that man himself is a king in disguise.

In all this Scott, though a Royalist and a Tory, had in the strangest way, the heart of the Revolution. For instance, he regarded rhetoric, the art of the orator, as the immediate weapon of the oppressed. All his poor men make grand speeches, as they did in the Jacobin Club, which Scott would have so much detested. And it is odd to reflect that he was, as an author, giving free speech to fictitious rebels while he was, as a stupid politician, denying it to real ones. But the point for us here is this that all this popular sympathy of his rests on the graver basis, on the dark dignity of man. “Can you find no way?” asks Sir Arthur Wardour of the beggar when they are cut off by the tide. “I’ll give you a farm . . . I’ll make you rich.” . . . “Our riches will soon be equal,” says the beggar, and looks out across the advancing sea.

That’s beautiful. To be clearer, Chesterton’s idea is beautiful, and so too is Scott’s, seen through this filter that allows the clutter of the novel to fall away and leaves us this piece of pure gold. I’m pretty sure The Antiquary is not a great novel, maybe not even a good one: it’s just too clunky and uneven–dull, even, for long stretches. But it has some great moments! And we read these things not because they are easy, but because they are Scottish, and they are challenging.

Mahbod Seraji, Rooftops of Tehran

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From the Novel Readings archives: A very interesting conversation this morning with an Iranian student taking my current summer course had me thinking again about Mahbod Seraji’s Rooftops of Tehran, which I reviewed last year. My student, who plans on becoming a journalist, is passionately interested in telling stories about the experience of living in Iran today, especially for women and children. I was fascinated to hear her account of having read Jane Eyre years ago in a Farsi version which she now realizes was heavily censored or revised–so that, for instance, Jane is a much less rebellious character. She brought out a number of ways in which our 19th-century readings (so far we’ve worked on Pride and Prejudice, Scott’s “The Two Drovers,” and Jane Eyre) resonate for her with very contemporary situations in Iran–in much the way that Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (a book she admires) suggests as well. One of the things we also discussed was how novels (both in the 19th-century and today) offer their readers a look at the human side of history and politics, something Mahbod Seraji had as an explicit goal when writing Rooftops of Tehran.

After I posted my review last year, Mahbod Seraji contacted me and we ended up having a long and very interesting phone conversation, about the novel and about his experiences as an Iranian-American author finding himself expected to answer questions about Iran or “the Middle East” as well as about his book. Clearly there is a hunger for information and understanding that is, in many ways, a good thing, but the expectation that he should be willing to speak as if somehow expert or representative also reflects a continuing inability to recognize that individuality is not a “Western” prerogative. Still, not unlike Scott writing about Highlanders for a primarily English audience, writing about Iran for an American audience inevitably  has a pedagogical component, as Seraji is well aware. I really appreciated both the opportunity to speak directly with him about his work and his interest in my own reading of it. That’s the kind of connection and exchange I think we all hope blogging will create.

In a talk at the American University of Cairo on “the image of the Arab in Western Literature” (linked here), Ahdaf Soueif emphasizes the limited range of character types (and particularly the limited kinds of agency) allotted to Arab characters even in literary fiction celebrated in the West for its sympathetic portrayal of Arab cultures and perspectives. (Two of the novels she focuses on are Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate and Richard Zimler’s The Search for Sana.) Although she stresses that the life work of Arab writers is not to represent themselves or their world to the West, she does also suggest the value of contributions by those at the “touching point” between cultures, particularly Arab-American writers and artists, many of whom, as she says, have “come out” since 9/11 to declare and explore their dual identities. I’m sure she would agree that her argument can be expanded from strictly Angl0-Arab encounters to “touching points” between the West and Iran: as a member of the so-called “Axis of Evil,” Iran is more likely to be misunderstood, misrepresented, or demonized in the popular imagination (at least in America) than most of its neighbours.

In the interview with Mahbod Seraji provided at the end of Rooftops of Tehran, the novelist addresses this problem directly:

‘As for current Americans’ misconceptions about Iran, I see a lot of misrepresentation in the media. Because the governments of Iran and the U.S. don’t get along, we tend to mischaracterize the people of Iran as evil. The media immediately conveys images and information that dehumanizes the Iranian people. Likewise, we’re encouraged to forget that our so-called enemies have feelings and are capable of love and friendship. We see them as so dissimilar, we can’t imagine that we may actually have a lot in common.’

Rooftops of Tehran is clearly offered as a corrective to these tendencies, an alternative representation of “the people of Iran” that emphasizes “common” human feelings and experiences: Seraji says that “love, hate, humour, friendships are universal qualities shared by people of all nations.” But, as he also remarks, “our cultures influence the ways in which we may respond to situations”: how we express love, hate, or friendship, for example, or what we find funny, will vary based on the world we live in, the values we are taught, and the examples set by those around us. Further, love, hate, and friendship may sound like highly personal experiences, but as Seraji’s novel highlights, even the most intimate relationships are lived in political contexts, affected by who has power and the ends towards which that power is directed. Rooftops of Tehran suggests that abusive power–political tyranny–warps people’s lives and characters by constraining, sometimes brutally, their individual desires. Though the love story at the heart of the novel may in some respects demystify Persian culture for North American readers because its basic ingredients seem so familiar (boy meets girl and falls in love, but girl is engaged to boy’s friend and mentor, boy nurtures forbidden passion, etc.), key plot developments including the horrific act at the novel’s center defamiliarize this world again, because their extremity is so difficult to translate, to explain, outside the context of pervasive and arbitrary oppression that frames the superficial normalcy of the characters’ lives. Yes, they love and hate, tease and bully, read and study, dream of becoming teachers or engineers–but the alley where they play out their lives and loves is subject to surveillance and invasion by the Shah’s secret police, against whom there can be no protest or recourse. Though it is a romance, then, Rooftops of Tehran can’t help but also be a novel of political protest, not just against the Shah’s regime but against the Western powers, especially the US, that support it.

Seraji remarks the disbelief expressed by his American college classmates in the 1970s when he told them about the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953: “half of the class accused me of lying because ‘the American government just doesn’t do bad things like that.'” Inevitably, part of his project in the novel is pedagogical, not just about Iran and the life and traditions of its ordinary people, but about how they perceive America and why. Historical and political information of this kind is difficult to integrate elegantly into fiction, especially when, as here, the focus is personal and style is spare, with little exposition. Seraji feeds us tidbits through his characters, as when the protagonist, Pasha, recalls his father saying of the SAVAK, “They live among us, work with us, come to our homes for dinner, participate in our happiness, mourn our losses, and then someday you find out that they have a second job working for the most loathed agency ever created in this country, thanks to the Americans and their CIA.” Pasha’s mentor, known as ‘Doctor,’ “used to say that Mossadegh’s overthrow was the biggest American foreign policy blunder in history. ‘No one in the Middle East will ever again trust the Americans and their phony guardianship of democracy,’ he declare[s] angrily.” Though Pasha dreams of studying in the US, Doctor’s fate teaches him to “‘hate the CIA'” as well: “‘They’re responsible for Doctor’s death, and the deaths of all the other young people executed by the Shah.'” To me, these conversations seemed artificial, though part of that may be simply the difference between a culture in which politics are literally a life and death matter and my own world, in which we take our freedoms so for granted that only a bare majority turn out to vote–or my own circle, more narrowly, in which politics are rarely discussed, much less heatedly. Still, if these moments are dubiously effective aesthetically, they certainly offer the novel’s target audience a different perspective on America’s international role.

And yet for all this, Rooftops of Tehran is not primarily a political novel. It conveys a strong sense of Persian culture, particularly in the ways it differs from Western norms. Again, some of the information is conveyed a bit awkwardly, as when Pasha reflects,

We Persians are not sophisticated when it comes to dealing with pain. I’ve heard that people in the West, especially in the United States, seek therapy when they experience emotional traumas. Our therapist is time. We trust that time heals everything, and that there is no need to dwell on pain. We don’t seek psychological treatment because we’re not as fragile as the Westerners, or so we claim. . . . We bring solace to our hearts by displaying our emotion.

His father explains “the intensity of our mourning” as a historical phenomenon:

‘A recurring theme in our history has been the massacre of our people, in what are now forgotten genocides at the hands of invaders like Alexander of Macedonia, the barbarian who burned down Persepolis; the Arabs, who brutalized our nation for hundreds of years; and Genghis Khan, who in the thirteenth century slaughtered three million of our citizens. . . . Our only recourse in the face of unpardonable evil has been to wail inconsolably.’

There is a great deal of mourning and wailing in Rooftops of Tehran; what is unexpected about it to Western sensibilities is not grief in the face of suffering and loss but the extent to which that grief is expressed through the tears of the male characters in particular. Seraji explains that Iran is one of “what the experts call ‘Affective’ cultures,” while North Americans live in “‘Neutral’ cultures”–and thus “would come across as cold and unfeeling to the people in the Affective cultures.” Again, then, we return to the point that universal emotions have historically and culturally specific expressions; though at times (as above) a Western reader may feel at the receiving end of a lecture from the course Seraji says he teaches called “Understanding Personal and Cultural Differences,” overall the novel is quite effective in bridging those differences by evoking those common human feelings. And in the end, Rooftops of Tehran is as much a romance, a love story, as anything else–a love story, and the story of the elusive quality referred to repeatedly in the novel as “That.” If love is threatened, often destroyed, by the oppressive conditions in which Pasha and his friends must shape their lives, “That” (a potent, if often latent, blend of courage, independence, loyalty, and resistance) defines the alternative to tyranny and flourishes (like the red rose Pasha plants in honor of his murdered mentor) despite–or even, perversely, because of–the arid and unforgiving environment in which it is planted.

Google Books Makes the Scottish Literature Challenge More Challenging…

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

I’m reading Scott’s The Antiquary as one of my books for Wuthering Expectations‘s “Scottish Literature Reading Challenge.” My only hard copy is an elegant but fragile 19th-century edition, but that’s no problem: I just downloaded it from Google Books, “a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make the world’s books discoverable online.”  I am happily reading it on my Sony Reader–happily, that is, except that I have to repeatedly infer the wording because their careful scanning wasn’t followed by anything like careful proofreading. “Die” repeatedly appears instead of “the,” for instance, and “9” instead of “?” It’s mostly not that hard to figure out what is meant, though it’s confusing that one of the protagonists keeps changing from “Lovel” to “Level,” and then sometimes when we get deep into Scots, I can’t be sure what it’s supposed to say, and when it comes to the (not infrequent) Latin, well, I have no idea at all. And sometimes–well, sometimes, I get to something like this:

I knew Anaelnw. Tic irai shrewd and prudent,
Wisdom and cunning had their shires of him;
But be was ihrew ah u a wayward child,
And pleased again by lays which childhood please’;
A»—took of faLIes graced with print of wood,
Ordae the jingling of a rusty medal,
Or the rare melody of nine old ditty,
That fint Wm sun? to pltase King Pcpiu’i cradle.

And then I just know that all the predictions about how Google Books will change the way we do everything are wrong, wrong, wrong.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

Rohan Maitzen11 Comments

The Bookshop is a gem of a book: spare but revealing, quirky but unsentimental. Its story is minimal: Florence Green, a widow, decides it is time to “make it clear to herself, and possibly to others, that she existed in her own right.” Her plan is to open a bookshore in the damp East Anglian town of Hardborough where she lives; the site she has chosen is the Old House, a property that has somehow survived over five hundred years and has stood empty for months. For no particularly good reason, Florence’s plan arouses, not so much hostility or outright antagonism, as a kind of discomfort in the town. She has a passive-aggressive rival for the Old House, Mrs Gamart, who declares her interest in establishing an Arts Center in it and tries a number of petty maneuvers for turning Florence out. Eventually, she succeeds. In the meantime, Florence has tried to make the shop, as well as the small lending library she establishes in it, a success, but neither ever really is successful, and in the end Florence has to accept that “the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years did not want a bookshop.” There are no great revelations along the way, but every action and interaction, every person and conversation,  is sharply rendered: this is my first experience reading Fitzgerald but she promptly joins my list of writers who just know, somehow, which words (and how many words) to use and just where to put them so that you are at once surprised and pleased by each sentence. I appreciated Florence, too, who, though not a heroic idealist, displays both resolution and independence of mind in the face of the soggy resistance of the other residents of Hardborough.  ‘It’s a peculiar thing to take a step forward in middle age,” she tells her banker, “but having done it, I don’t intend to retreat.” When she opens the shop, she plans no celebration, “because she was uncertain who should be asked. The frame of mind, however, is everything. Given that, one can have a very satisfactory party all by oneself.” Reading that line, it struck me as an insight particularly apt for a book lover. She isn’t all by herself in her endeavor, as it turns out: she is joined in the store by 10-year-old Christine Gipping, who comes to  “help out,” and who, in one of the book’s darting moments of humor, raps Mrs Gamart across the knuckles (literally) when she bustles in and interferes with the precedence list at the lending library, which Florence has put under Christine’s charge. Milo North, a minor celebrity in town because he does “something in TV,” is an ally of sorts, until he is enlisted in one of Mrs Gamart’s conspiracies against Florence’s posession of the Old House. And the town’s reclusive intellectual, Edmund  Brundish, writes Florence a letter of support when she opens and advises her, when she asks for his opinion, that she ought to stock Lolita:

I have read Lolita, as you requested. It is a good book, and therefore you should try to sell it to the inhabitants of Hardborough. They won’t understand it, but that is all to the good. Understanding makes the mind lazy.

She does order Lolita for the shop, and the window display attracts significant attention–enough that it becomes the grounds of a legal complaint by Mrs Gamart, who claims it provides “a temporary obstruction unreasonable in quantum and duration to the use of the highway.” The epistolary exchange between Florence and her lawyer, Mr Thornton, following Mrs Gamart’s complaint is a treat; it ends with the succinct message, “Coward!” Mrs Gamart’s campaign also eventually draws Edmund Brundish out of hiding: more than anyone else in the novel, he attempts to take a stand on principle. But Florence’s bookshop is not part of a crusade for high culture, and The Bookshop is not a satire about anti-intellectualism or freedom from censorship. It’s just a story about a small community too soggy to take a clear impression from the weight of an outsider’s plans. It’s also a story in which it seems perfectly natural that everyone, Florence included, believes in the “rapper” who haunts the Old House. This is not Sarah Waters territory here, no realm of the gothic or uncanny:

‘Your rapper’s been at my adjustable spanners,’ said the plumber, without rancour, when she came to see how the work was going forward. His tool bag had been upended and scattered; pale blue tiles with a nice design of waterlilies had been flung broadside about the upstairs passage. The bathroom, with its water supply half connected, had the alert air of having witnessed something.

In the end, it’s Florence, not the poltergeist, who is unnatural and unwanted in Hardborough.