January 2011 – Novel Readings

Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

January 31, 2011Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

The Summer Book is this month’s selection for discussion at (by?) The Slaves of Golconda. I had never heard of it–or of its author, who turns out to be best known for her children’s series, the Moomin stories–before its nomination, so I was refreshingly free of preconceptions when I started it. Yet, somehow, it still managed to surprise me! I guess the whole idea of a book about a little girl spending summers on an island with her grandmother raised subconscious expectations that it would be precious or sentimental, or (worse) both. It is neither. Instead, it is tart and precise, occasionally very funny, and at moments unexpectedly moving. When I finished it, I had the (perhaps uncharitable) thought that if an American novelist had written it, it would have insisted too hard on an uplifting story line: the grandmother’s illness (treated only elliptically here) would have been more conspicuous, the quarrel with Sophia would have been harsher and more destructive, and then the end would have been a reconciliation scene putting out flowery tendrils towards nostalgia and some kind of feel-good lesson. Also, it would not have had a chapter called “The Enormous Plastic Sausage.” But of course this is only speculation. Perhaps there is an American novelist who could be as ironically restrained as Jansson, even on a subject like summer.

I realized it wasn’t going to be a cloying sort of book right at the beginning:

It was an early, very warm morning in July, and it had rained during the night. The bare granite steamed, the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture, and all the colours everywhere had deepened. Below the veranda, the vegetation in the morning shade was like a rainforest of lush, evil leaves and flowers, which she had to be careful not to break as she searched. She held one hand in front of her mouth and was constantly afraid of losing her balance.

‘What are you doing?’ asked little Sophia.

‘Nothing,’ her grandmother answered. ‘That is to say,’ she added angrily, ‘I’m looking for my false teeth.’

Gotcha! All that wonderfully tactile description, and the delicate placing of the grandmother and little Sophia in amongst it, and then false teeth! And when they find them, she puts them right back in, “with a smacking noise. They went in very easily,” we’re told. “It had really hardly been worth mentioning.” But aren’t you glad it was mentioned?

That little opening sequence sets us up well for what follows, which is a series of episodic reminsicences, each focusing on a particular moment, or theme, or problem, and each revealing (almost accidentally, it sometimes seems) some facet of the relationship between Sophia and her grandmother and their island. It’s not a book that really lends itself to deep analysis or broad thematic generalizations. Instead, it’s a book to be savored for the moments it gives you. One of my favorite chapters was “Playing Venice,” which (as I understood it, at least) tells us indirectly where Sophia’s mother has disappeared to (she’s never in the book).* After Sophia receives a postcard from Venice (“Her whole name was on the address side, with ‘Miss’ in front, and on the shiny side was the prettiest picture anyone in the family had ever seen”), she and her grandmother build their own Venice in the marsh pond out of bits of stone and marble and sticks; Grandmother even makes “a Doge’s palace out of balsa wood … [and] painted it with watercolours and gold.” They imagine themselves as a family that lives in their new Venice, a father, mother, and daughter–but beneath the playful surface, something unhappy lurks:

‘Look, Mama,’ [Sophia] called. ‘I’ve found a new palace.’

‘But my dear child, I’m only “Mama” to your father,’ Grandmother said. She was concerned.

‘Is that so!’ Sophia shouted. ‘Why is he the only one who gets to say “Mama”?’

She threw the palace in the water and stalked away.

Grandmother makes “a hotel and a trattoria and a campanile with a little lion on top. . . . One day, there was a green salamander in the Grand Canal and traffic had to make a long detour.” But then it starts to rain.

She could see right away that the whole shoreline was flooded, and then she saw Sophia running towards her across the rock.

‘It’s sunk,’ Sophia screamed. ‘She’s gone!’

Grandmother sends Sophia back to bed, promising to save the palace. We know, though Jansson doesn’t belabor us about it, that it’s not bits of balsa wood she’s worried about salvaging.

So there are moments of intensity, and like the Venice episode, they arise out of the disproportionate feelings of childhood, the lack of perspective that sometimes actually clarifies, rather than distorts, reality. There’s drama–as in the chapter “Sophia’s Storm”:

Sophia climbed up into the tower. The tower room was very small and had four windows, one for each point of the compass. She saw that the island had shurnk and grown terribly small, nothing but an insignificant patch of rocks and colourless earth. But the sea was immense: what and yellow and grey and horizonless. There was only this one island, surrounded by water, threatened and shelted by the storm, forgotten by everyone but God, who granted prayers…

…including, so Sophia is convinced, her own, which was “Dear God, let something happen … I’m bored to death. Amen.” “All the boats will be wrecked,” reflects Grandmother, “thoughtlessly.” “Sophia stared at her and screamed, ‘How can you talk like that when you know it’s my fault? I prayed for a storm, and it came!'” There’s suspense, as in the chapter “The Robe,” in which Sophia’s father takes the boat out for supplies and is late coming back:

There was a southwest wind when he set out, and in a couple of hours it had risen so that the wives were riding right across the point. Grandmother tried to get the weather report on the radio, but she couldn’t find the right button. She couldn’t keep from going back to the north window every few minutes to look for him, and she didn’t understand a word she read.

Then there’s Berenice, “a fairly new friend, whose hair [Sophia]admired.” Not only does Berenice have trouble making herself at home on the island, but Sophia isn’t altogether happy having her there either, and one day she ends up in the water.

‘Did she really dive?’ Grandmother asked.

‘Yes, really. I gave her a shove and she dived.’

‘Oh,’ Grandmother said. ‘And then what?’

‘Her hair can’t take salt water,’ explained Sophia sadly. ‘It looks awful. And it was her hair I liked.’

That complacently mournful remark perfectly captures the innocent egotism of childhood, doesn’t it? But Sophia’s not awful; she’s just six. And Grandmother knows that raising her right doesn’t always mean raising the tone. One day after a deep discussion about God and the devil (“‘You can see for yourself that life is bad enough without being punished for it afterwards. We get comfort when we die, that’s the whole idea.” “It’s not hard at all!” Sophia shouted. “And what are you going to do about the Devil, then? He lives in Hell'”), Grandmother restores harmony with a song that, joyfully, Sophia learns to sing “just as badly as her grandmother”:

Cowpats are free,

Tra-la-la

But don’t throw them at me.

Tra-la-la

For you too could get hit

Tra-la-la

With cow shit!

In spite of everything, and because of everything, and in the least saccharine way possible, it always turns out they’re a perfect pair.

Other reviews from this discussion:

Of Books and Bicycles
Tales from the Reading Room
So Many Books
Book Gazing
things mean a lot

*Update: DorothyW at Of and Bicycles caught a detail that I apparently missed, a passing reference to Sophia’s mother as dead. Given the somewhat elusive chronology of the book, I suppose it is possible that at some point she is just away, but I’m probably just fishing for excuses for my own slip!

(cross-posted here)

Margaret Kennedy, The Ladies of Lyndon

January 30, 2011Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Despite being endlessly distracted by the continuing coverage of the Egyptian protests on Al Jazeera as well as by finishing up a review of Sara Paretsky’s Body Work for the February issue of Open Letters Monthly, I did manage to finish my second Margaret Kennedy novel (her first), The Ladies of Lyndon, in time for the end of Virago Reading Week. Perhaps because of those distractions–though I don’t rule out the possibility that the book itself is at fault–I don’t feel I have really grasped what ideas or interests are at the center of this novel. Like The Constant Nymph, it has left me perplexed, and I actually found The Constant Nymph (odd as it was) more emotionally involving, though both are written with the same flat affect or understatement. Nobody in The Ladies of Lyondon is developed very deeply, including the putative main character, Agatha Clewer, whose marriage frames the novel. As in The Constant Nymph, our attention is spread across a range of other characters and subplots, and my expectation in such a case is that (as would happen in a Trollope novel) these will turn out to be related like some kind of theme and variations–but I can’t seem to see through the miscellany of this novel to that central theme. Perhaps that is the wrong model, and the unity (assuming for now that the novel is unified) arises from contiguity rather than coherence, which I suppose is how most aspects of people’s real lives are in fact related. In any case, I admit to not finding it a very compelling novel on this initial read. Perhaps as I write a bit more about it I will find my way to something more interesting. Also, I expect to find my bearings as I read more by and about Kennedy–there is often a kind of disconnect between my expectations and a new flavor of novel, after all.

One aspect that I think deserves further consideration is Kennedy’s emphasis on art and her interest in artists. The value and integrity of art is a major concern of The Constant Nymph too, though in that novel music matters most, whereas in The Ladies of Lyndon the artist character is a painter. We never get a detailed account of what his work looks like, but we are repeatedly told that people don’t like to look at it. At one point someone wonders if he might be a cubist, I think. Yet it can’t be significantly experimental, or at least it is representational enough that one major plot sequence turns on his incorporating portraits of family members into a classically-themed mural he has done (a satirical gesture at the expense of the nouveau riche brother-in-law who commissioned it). The artist, James, is also “mentally deficient”–0r is he? He is introduced this way initially and treated this way by most of his family, but by the end it isn’t clear that there was ever anything really amiss with him beyond noncomformity and an inability (or a refusal) to meet social expectations (if the novel had been first published this year, he would probably be counted in the small but growing group of “Aspie” characters). In The Constant Nymph dedication to art stands as an honorable (if often uncomfortably idiosyncratic) alternative to social conventions and materialism. There’s something of that in The Ladies of Lyndon too. For one thing, James makes the only good marriage we see–and he does so by marrying ‘outside’ his class (he marries a servant) and establishing himself at his wife’s level rather than raising her to his: they both accept this as the more natural and comfortable plan, and the moral and social independence it gives them is refreshing compared to the posturing of most of the other characters. There’s no sign that they influence anyone or anything, though: they just go off and do their thing, and also (again unlike the other characters) they reproduce energetically, which I suppose is one way of endorsing their unassuming radicalism, or at least hinting that it is the way of the future.

The title to the novel, and the introduction in the Virago edition, both point to Lyndon as an important symbol in the novel. Here’s a bit from the introduction (by Nicola Beauman):

And it is Lyndon which is the symbol of the change which creeps over both Agatha and the world: after the war it represents the sloughed-off skin of England’s past. It can no longer be the greedy, devouring ‘shring of ease’ it had once been. It can either disintegrate, adjust to the ‘sensible’ values of post-war life or become a Braxhall. . . . The war is shown to have wrought enormous, totally unexpected changes. Lyndon has to change, Agatha changes, the Sir Thomas Bragges of this world are in the ascendant. . . .

OK, in retrospect that sounds plausible (I read the introduction after the novel) but to be honest, I didn’t pick up on the significance of the house at all. I would have put the emphasis on the other key word in the title, ‘Ladies’: the novel surveys the personalities and choices of a motley collection of women related, one way or another, to each other. But the survey strikes me as cursory, and though there is some talk of what makes a good marriage (really, the only substantial choice any of them makes is of a partner), none of the women, and none of the marriages, and not even the adulterous liaison that gives just a little scandalous momentum to the novel, was drawn out enough for me to care particularly. Flat, as I said, and just a little dull, except for the eccentricity of its bits and pieces.

One sign of my difficulties making The Ladies of Lyndon meaningful is that I couldn’t focus on any particular passages to flag: my trademark post-its are stuck in sort of perfunctorily, mostly at what I took to be key developments in the plot–to help me find them again!–whereas usually I use them to trace interesting patterns or themes that emerge. I also can’t settle on any passage worth quoting, though as I flip through once more I don’t see anything specifically wrong with the book either. Is it possible that my Margaret Kennedy project will lead me to the conclusion that she is justly forgotten as a novelist? Well, that hardly seems a fair prediction based on just two of her sixteen books, and early ones at that. Tomorrow I’ll read the chapter on her in Susan Leonardi’s Dangerous By Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists, and maybe that will help me frame her writing in the way that brings out its significant qualities. I’ve also taken a later novel of hers, Together and Apart, off the shelf. If at first you don’t succeed…. In the meantime, if any of you out there have given any thought to Margaret Kennedy in general or The Ladies of Lyndon in particular, I’d be interested in hearing from you!

Cairo Time

January 28, 2011Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

I’m finding it impossible not to be preoccupied by the drama unfolding in Egypt this week. Every news network is covering it in detail, of course; for a round-up with commentary, check out Aaron Bady’s recent post at zunguzungu. I’m not in a position to add anything original of my own, but I wanted to draw attention to two compelling pieces by Egyptian novelists (one of which Aaron also links to). Here’s Ahdaf Soueif, writing in the Guardian yesterday:

Patience is a virtue – maybe even the supreme one in Egypt‘s popular hierarchy of values, but patience also has its limits and, now, at last, it seems as if we’ve arrived at ours. And fittingly, it’s the young of the country who are leading us. They’ve had enough of unemployment, deteriorating education, corruption, police brutality and political impotence.

As is now well known, they organised Tuesday’s protests over Facebook and in closed virtual and actual meetings. Talk about grassroots! “They” is some 20 groups that have sprung up over the last five years. The question has always been how and when will they coalesce? They did on Tuesday; they fused, and with them multitudes of Egyptians young and old – inspired by what happened in Tunis.

They organised protests from Assiut in the south, to Sheikh Zuwayyid in Sinai, and Alexandria, Suez and other cities the length and breadth of Egypt. For Cairo they chose three locations: Shubra, Matariyya and Arab League Street. These were strategic choices: naturally crowded neighbourhoods, with lots of side streets off the main road. Young activists started their march in nearby areas, collected a following and by the time they reached, for example, Arab League Street, they were 20,000 marching.

The Central Security Forces were in chaos; when they formed cordons the people just broke through them. When they raised their riot shields and batons the young people walked right up to them with their hands up chanting “Silmiyyah! [Peaceable] Silmiyyah!”

In Tahrir Square, in the centre of Cairo, on Tuesday night Egypt refound and celebrated its diversity. The activists formed a minor part of the gathering, what was there was The People.

Young people of every background and social class marched and sang together. Older, respected figures went round with food and blankets. Cigarette-smoking women in jeans sat next to their niqab-wearing sisters on the pavement. Old comrades from the student movement of the 1970s met for the first time in decades. Young people went round collecting litter. People who stayed at home phoned nearby restaurants with orders to deliver food to the protesters. Not one religious or sectarian slogan was heard. The solidarity was palpable. And if this sounds romantic, well, it was and is.

Then, at1am, Central Security attacked. Ferociously.

(Here’s an earlier piece by Soueif, also, that almost anticipates this week’s events.)

Novelist Alaa Al Aswany was among the protestors:

I found myself in the midst of thousands of young Egyptians, whose only point of similarity was their dazzling bravery and their determination to do one thing – change the regime. Most of them are university students who find themselves with no hope for the future. They are unable to find work, and hence unable to marry. And they are motivated by an untameable anger and a profound sense of injustice.

I will always be in awe of these revolutionaries. Everything they have said shows a sharp political awareness and a death-defying desire for freedom. . . .

More ordinary citizens are now defying the police. A young demonstrator told me that, when running from the police on Tuesday, he entered a building and rang an apartment bell at random. It was 4am. A 60-year-old man opened the door, fear obvious on his face. The demonstrator asked the man to hide him from the police. The man asked to see his identity card and invited him in, waking one of his three daughters to prepare some food for the young man. They ate and drank tea together and chatted like lifelong friends.

In the morning, when the danger of arrest had receded, the man accompanied the young protester into the street, stopped a taxi for him and offered him some money. The young man refused and thanked them. As they embraced the older man said: “It is I who should be thanking you for defending me, my daughters and all Egyptians.”

That is how the Egyptian spring began. Tomorrow, we will see a real battle.

Update

From the Archives: Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April

January 27, 2011Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

As part of Virago Reading Week, Danielle at A Work in Progress has written a lovely post on Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Solitary Summer:

This is a book that could easily be devoured, but I’d rather take my time and savor it. I was reading it at work in our break room, but it was so noisy I shut the book and set it aside preferring to take it somewhere quiet where I could escape into its pages. I wish I could spend my summer this way.

“May 2nd–Last night after dinner, when we were in the garden, I said, ‘I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls they will be told I am out, or away, or sick. I shall spend the months in the garden, and on the plain, and in the forests. I shall watch the things that happen in my garden, and see where I have made mistakes. On wet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forests, where the pine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I’ll lie on the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall be perpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me. Out there on the plain there is silence, and where there is silence I have discovered there is peace”

There’s much to be said about silence, don’t you think? I already think there is too much noise in the world and so much more than in von Arnim’s day. But I especially like the idea of the sort of silence you would find in a garden–not a complete silence, but the sort of hum you would find in nature. I’ll be taking my book to peaceful, quiet corners and imagining the solitude von Arnim writes about.

In another post Danielle mentions how much she enjoyed von Arnim’s The Enchanted April; I followed her link to her earlier review of that novel, which in turn sent me browsing through my own archives until I found my comments on it. It’s hard to believe it has been more than three years since I read it, as the pleasure it gave me is still very vivid in my reading memory. Here’s what I wrote then, reproduced not because what I think what I had to say was particularly eloquent or original, but because it’s nice to linger a little in thoughts of love and flowers on this cold day.

The Enchanted April is delightful. In many ways, it was exactly what I expected, light but touching, warm but poignant. Without extended explicit social commentary, it shows its women realizing, emotionally more than intellectually, how the constraints of their usual world confine them, but also how they contribute to their own diminishment. More than the movie version, the novel maintains some skepticism about the rapprochement of the women and their husbands (for instance, we always know, though Lotty doesn’t, that Mellersh is well-behaved mostly because he hopes to gain clients, and we also know the comedy of errors that nearly erupted because Frederick comes to see the wrong woman). But what I wasn’t expecting was the marvellously tactile quality of von Armin’s prose:

The cherry-trees and peach-trees were in blossom–lovely showers of white and deep rose-colour among the trembling delicacy of the olives; the fig-leaves were just big enough to smell of figs, the vine-buds were only beginning to show. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and purple irises, and bushes of lavendar, and grey, sharp cactuses, and the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the bottom was the sea. Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour, piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers…

The obvious comparison is with A Room with a View (and I learned from the afterword in my edition that Forster tutored von Arnim’s children for a time). But this novel is about adults coming to terms with their lives and loves, and so it has more wistfulness, and more lurking pathos, than Forster’s. I loved Mrs Fisher’s gradual emergence from what Lotty calls her “cocoon” (even if it is, like Lucy’s awakening in A Room with a View, basically at the expense of the Victorians): “Her great dead friends [Ruskin, Arnold, Tennyson…] did not seem worth reading that night. . . . No doubt they were greater than any one was now, but they had this immense disadvantage, that they were dead. Nothing further was to be expected of them; while of the living, what might one not still expect?” The afterword remarks, rather unexpectedly, “The novel is the lightest of omelettes, in the making of which the least possible number of eggs gets broken. Only an incorrigible pedant would try to judge it at a deeper level.” Well, call me incorrigible, and a pedant (I’ve been called worse, goodness knows), but I enjoyed the novel so much it lit a little spark of scholar’s curiosity in me and made me curious to look up a former M.A. student of mine I haven’t heard from in a while whom I recall had proposed a Ph.D. project on von Arnim. It also (especially in combination with our first snow of the season) made me dream of going back to Italy!

(Danielle and I are both reading Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book for the Slaves of Golconda‘s January session. There really is something comforting about escaping into thoughts of summer when the view outside is all ice and slush!)

Virago Reading Week

January 26, 2011Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

A little while back, when I mentioned my plan to read through a bunch of Virago Modern Classics while on sabbatical, beginning with Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, Carolyn of A Few of My Favourite Books (I love that you can tell she’s Canadian by the ‘u’ in ‘Favourite’) wrote to let me know that she was co-hosting a Virago Reading Week. It began Monday, and there’s all kinds of related activity and lots of links to follow up at Carolyn’s blog. Carolyn has also compiled a very helpful list of Virago authors, and through the links on her site I discovered that another blogger has compiled a list of Virago (and Persephone) titles that are available online, many for free. One of the earliest reviews to go up as part of this Virago venture is this nice piece on Antonia White’s Frost in May, itself the first Virago Modern Classic published (in 1978):

Since the entire book is narrated from Nanda’s point of view it’s a good thing she’s observant. She uses the sharp gaze of an outsider, for not only is she a convert, she is also middle-class. But “Lippington,” as the school is known, is the favored educational venue for a kind of borderless European aristocracy. The glamorous girls are Spanish, Irish, Franco-German, and feature cardinals and abbesses on their family trees. Nanda, though accepted as a friend, can never share their easy identification as members of the one True Church.

But as we might guess from the title, this is an education gone awry. White is sharp about the power the nuns exert over their charges, the surveillance and what we might call emotional blackmail. The founding principle of the school is the breaking of a child’s character so that it may be re-formed in a manner more pleasing to God. This is the “frost” of the title, of course.

But is there more to the tale than the humiliation and grief visited upon a young girl? Nanda is well-drawn, but the secondary characters — those glamorous aristocratic Catholic girls — tend to be endowed with marvelous heads of hair and a few tics. The nuns are stock figures as well, remote and manipulative. (Rumer Godden does a much better job of seeing beyond the habit.) White’s hurt and outrage are fresh, but they are the only note she sounds. (read the whole post here, at Carol Wallace’s blog Book Group of One)

Quite a collection of other book bloggers have made plans to read and review Virago titles including E. M. Delafield’s Thank Heaven Fasting, Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Solitary Summer, Winifred Holtby’s South Riding, and Barbara Comyns’s The Vet’s Daughter–and so many more that it’s probably best, if you have other work or reading to do, not to spend too much time browsing the possibilities. I don’t notice much mention of Margaret Kennedy, though. My modest Virago Reading Week plan is to keep on with her first novel, The Ladies of Lyndon, which (obviously) she wrote before The Constant Nymph but which was not much of a success until after Nymph caught the public fancy. The introduction to The Ladies of Lyndon basically promises that the novel will live up to its underwhelming debut. I guess I’ll find out.

Philosophical Novels

January 23, 2011Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

In this week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review, James Ryerson wonders about the relationship between philosophy and literature:

Both disciplines seek to ask big questions, to locate and describe deeper truths, to shape some kind of order from the muddle of the world. But are they competitors — the imaginative intellect pitted against the logical mind — or teammates, tackling the same problems from different angles?

Interesting question! You could write a whole book about it–indeed, it could probably generate enough discussion to sustain an entire scholarly journal! Or, I guess, you could rattle off a few paragraphs in the Times.

Ryerson’s is a pretty typical piece in that it focuses on philosophy as a set of ideas and on literature as an aesthetic practice rather than considering the way form itself might have philosophical implications or be used to carry out or exemplify ideas. He also makes, but then fortunately backs away from, some of the silly broad generalizations that get bandied about when this topic comes up, such as “Philosophy is concerned with the general and abstract; literature with the specific and particular. Philosophy dispels illusions; literature creates them.” When people say things like this, I just want to mutter “Pope!” at them until they stop talking.

Ryerson touches on a number of the usual suspects for a discussion of this topic, including Aristotle, Sartre, Henry James, and Iris Murdoch, along with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (author of the fairly tedious 36 Arguments for the Existence of God–a novel written by, for, and about philosophers if there ever was one!) but never mentions the one novelist to have been included in a dictionary of philosophers as well as to have been discussed in the eminent philosophy journal Mind–George Eliot. Martha Nussbaum’s indifference to Eliot in Love’s Knowledge prompted my own foray into this territory, “Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Life of Middlemarch.” This essay focused primarily on arguing with Nussbaum about her fixation on Henry James in general and The Golden Bowl in particular:

In this essay, I examine Martha Nussbaum’s fundamental claim about fiction, which I will call her “formal claim”: her argument that the philosophical significance of novels is to be found not in whatever theories or principles they might overtly discuss or dramatize but in their literary form and in their style. Drawing on my analysis of this formal claim, I critique the Jamesian-Aristotelian model she develops as profoundly anti-philosophical in its commitment to indeterminacy, mystery, and complexity. I argue that the Jamesian consciousness Nussbaum would have us emulate, far from being, as she believes, egalitarian, humane, and morally responsible, is elitist, exclusionary, and morally inert.[1] I propose, instead, George Eliot’s Middlemarch as exemplary of fiction’s potential as moral philosophy, for its approach and its answer to the question “How should one live?” and for its integration of novelistic perception and philosophic reflection.

[1] As Catherine Gardner describes it, the traditional philosophical approach or “philosophical model” is “the search for cogent and consistent arguments, the evaluation of the correctness of conclusions, and the construction of a systematic theory from these conclusions and arguments.” Moral Philosophy and the Novels of George Eliot. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation (Philosophy), University of Virginia, 1996, p. 3. Gardner suggests that George Eliot’s novels are “too ‘philosophical’ (in the traditional sense)” to satisfy Nussbaum’s desire for fiction that, like James’s, emphasizes perception, inquiry, and uncertainty.

Nussbaum’s method, ironically, is philosophical insofar as she considers her textual examples ahistorically, investigating their arguments or theories as a contemporary analytic philosopher approaches Descartes or Aquinas—that is, with little regard for historical or contextual placing or significance. Alisdair MacIntyre notes “the persistently unhistorical treatment of moral philosophy by contemporary philosophers . . . [who] all too often treat the moral philosophers of the past as contributors to a single debate with a relatively unvarying subject-matter, treating Plato and Hume and Mill as contemporaries both of ourselves and of each other.” After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd edition. (U Notre Dame P, 1984), p. 11.

Aren’t you glad I don’t write this way in my blog posts? In retrospect, I am very aware that I was actually trying to write ‘philosophically’ myself. I’m not actually a fan of ‘metadiscourse’–talking about the essay and its argument instead of just, you know, writing the essay and making the argument–but I was suffering a certain boundary-crossing anxiety. I had more fun later on in the essay when I got to turn away from Nussbuam (and The Golden Bowl–whew!) and write about Middlemarch:

Readers of Middlemarch will be well aware of how many passages in the novel insist on this need to replace the “flattering illusion” of our own centrality with the realization that others have an “equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference” (135). My own interest here is to point out how the narrative itself, in its form, adheres to this principle and thus becomes, as Nussbaum argues James’s novels become, not just an account of but an example of the moral imperative—the ethical approach—it advocates. Catherine Gardner notes that most philosophical approaches to literature leave us wondering “why we would want to read [these theories] in a novel rather than a philosophical treatise,” while discussions of Eliot and philosophy leave it “unclear why Eliot would choose to express her ideas in the form of a novel.”[1] . . . Fictional form of the sort Eliot creates is essential to the adequate presentation of this philosophical outlook: while the novel’s morality can be summarized or paraphrased, such a reduced account cannot reproduce the movement from self to other. George Eliot’s moral philosophy, to put it another way, requires fictional form precisely because its basis is that movement from our own limited perspectives to the point of view of others and an awareness of relationships and connections across a wide range of individual experiences—the intellectual and imaginative movement that is the basis of sympathy. While Middlemarch often, through its characters and events, tells us the value of this movement, and dramatizes the need for it as well as its difficulties, costs, and rewards, its greatest contribution as philosophical fiction is that it moves its readers in just this way. Unlike readers of The Golden Bowl, readers of Middlemarch participate while they are reading the novel in an active, engaged ethical program.

. . .

“One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea—but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?” (175). Over and over . . . Middlemarch challenges the assumption that a single point of view suffices for understanding. Just as individual characters learn by revisiting, rethinking, what they have seen or done, the novel and its implied author enact the moral obligation to see things from a different angle and disrupt our own desire—egotistical or readerly—to think, as [Geoffrey] Harpham puts it, “only through the ‘I.’” And, as in the example from Chapter 29 just quoted, the overt artifice, the intrusiveness, of this method induces self-consciousness about it and so reflection on its implications: philosophical deliberation is both modeled and prompted by these novelistic techniques. Not only does Eliot’s implied author demonstrate an ethos much more congenial to community as well as individual flourishing than James’s, but she also practices a form of fiction that works with her readers towards an answer to the question, not “How should one live?” but “How should we live?”

[1] Moral Philosophy and the Novels of George Eliot, p. 19. Her chief example of such a conventional approach to philosophy in Eliot’s fiction is George Levine’s discussion of Eliot’s determinism.

OK, it’s not deathless prose, but it made it past the gatekeepers at Philosophy & Literature (home, of course, of the Bad Writing Contest). And I did make my best effort to get in the game Nussbaum proposed, which was to stop looking at literary texts as examples of philosophical problems or considering them philosophically significant only insofar as they overtly parrot or dramatize specific philosophical theorems, and instead to think about how their actual literary qualities get certain kinds of ethical work done. Much of the work I’ve read in this suposedly interdisciplinary zone moves very quickly towards plot summary, but if the important work of a novel is done at that reductive level, what an inefficient process!*

*My essay is behind a paywall, unfortunately, but if you’re actually interested in reading the whole thing and can’t get at it, let me know.

Blogging the Victorians

January 20, 2011Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

It seems like I haven’t been writing about much Victorian literature recently (except for my teaching posts, and even there, last term I didn’t have nearly as much Victorian content as usual!). Happily for us all, though, there are other bloggers who have lots of good things to say about the good stuff. Recently, for instance, Amateur Reader, over at Wuthering Expectations, had all kinds of fun with Trollope’s Barchester Towers. I particularly enjoyed his very savvy (and admirably terse–how does he do that!) discussion of Trollope’s sly and self-referential sense of humor:

Trollope has two comic modes, which he alternates. He creates a cast of characters, types and more-than-types, two-and-a-half dimensional, not quite real people – I mean in the way that imaginary people like Elizabeth Bennet and Don Quixote and Huck Finn are real people – but really extraordinarily well-made marionettes. Then he deftly bashes them against each other in ever-varying combinations. See Chapters 10 and 11 of Barchester Towers, “Mrs. Proudie’s Reception,” for Trollope Mode 1 at its best:

“The German professors are men of learning,” said Mr. Harding, “but —“

“German professors!” groaned out the chancellor, as though his nervous system had received a shock which nothing but a week of Oxford air could cure. (Ch. 11)

That quotation has nothing to do with my point, come to think of it. Still, I think we have all felt just that shock.

The other comic mode is the comment on the action, Trollope-the-narrator having his fun. I’m back in Chapter 37:

A man must be an idiot or else an angel who, after the age of forty, shall attempt to be just to his neighbours.

Trollope was, at the time of the publication of Barchester Towers, forty-two. He’s not an idiot. Perhaps he is claiming to be an angel. Perhaps something else.

My favorite joke, which might not look like much:

[Mr. Slope] had, however, at the present moment imbibed too much of Mr. Thorne’s champagne to have any inward misgivings. He was right in repeating the boast of Lady Macbeth: he was not drunk, but he was bold enough for anything. It was a pity that in such a state he could not have encountered Mrs. Proudie. (Ch. 40)

Mr. Slope is a first-rate comic character; Mrs. Proudie, who we met above, surely among Trollope’s finest. At this point in the novel, they are enemies. Why does the narrator think it a pity that the bold and tipsy Slope does not meet the grim Mrs. Proudie? Because the scene would be really funny. Trollope would like to write it, has perhaps even imagined it. But they cannot meet. The plot calls. Such a shame. And what a classic comedian’s trick, the joke about the even funnier joke he’s not allowed to tell.

Read more here, and here. (Read the comments, too. AR also gets some of the best comments threads of any blog I read. I credit his diligence in participating in them, as well, of course, as the engaging qualities of his posts themselves.) I really must not let my sabbatical go by without reading more Trollope. On my very first sabbatical I read the entire Palliser series straight through. At the time it felt a little self-indulgent, but in retrospect it was an excellent use of my time!

There’s more Victorian goodness at Tales from the Reading Room, where litlove has managed to bring Mary Elizabeth Braddon and (wait for this) Slavoj Zizek into the same post. Didn’t see that coming, did you? She does it by way of the anxiety on display throughout Lady Audley’s Secret about action:

But no, this is the Victorian period, and so women acting is WRONG, and must be stopped. And yet, if you look a little more closely at the narrative, it’s possible to see that anxiety surrounds all forms of action. Robert Audley’s story, for instance, is no better in this respect. . . . By the end of the story, Robert has reconciled himself to a degree of action, and looks back at his original lethargy with distaste. But Lady Audley… ah I will not tell you what happens to her, but those who know the story already will recall how her relationship to action unfolds.

The emotional conflict that surrounds action is by no means purely a Victorian problem. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek suggests that the move to action is a fraught one because it involves leaving the comfort of our fantasies behind. After all, what do we do before we act, but think and dream and plan? When confined to our heads, we keep control over both our behaviour and its outcome, but stepping away from that reassuring fantasy and into the unpredictability of the real world often looks just too dangerous to attempt. . . . Žižek’s theories are not perfect, you can argue against them, but they do give pause for thought, and they do raise the question of why we feel so anxious about acting.

Perhaps we can trace our fear of action back to its manifestation here in Lady Audley’s Secret, where it is not secret at all but brought into the bright light of the narrative. . .

I have tended to begin my own analysis of Lady Audley’s Secrets from the Elaine Showalter line alluded to by one of litlove’s commenters: Showalter proclaims that Lady Audley is “not only sane, but representative.” But litlove is certainly right that the anxieties in the novel are not exclusively about Lady Audley.

Many of the posts from Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor are of Victorian interest, of course. Recently she has been “live-blogging” what sounds like a particularly deadly example of the Victorian religious fiction she reads (as she often says) so the rest of us don’t have to:

P. 42: “…we shall delight to hear your narrative, in which we hope you will tell us every particular.” No. Please no.

P. 44: Now, why is this novel, which seemed to be leading up to an attack on the Oxford Movement in the preface, actually set in 1788?

P. 48: “I find I have occupied your time longer than I at first intended, and I perceive also that I have but weakly expressed what was in my mind.” The story of this novel’s life. Luckily, the reader was distracted by the length of the letter: nearly five pages in print, which would make it how long in manuscript…? Our humble correspondent either wrote in really tiny print, or crossed, recrossed, and rerecrossed his letter.

P. 48: “I have many more interesting communications…” The innocent reader feels vaguely threatened by this announcement.

Complete, and completely gripping, details can be found here, here, and here. Oh, and also here:

P. 519: “Should the reader wish to hear of the Oxford Students, after leaving college, and to peruse the chequered events of their riper years, when they became settled and married, and the fathers of families, and vicars and rectors, they must call for the Second Series of ‘Truth without Fiction;’ or, ‘The Oxonians after leaving College.'” Ha-ha! Good one, there!

…You mean you’re serious? Oh, my.

Book Club: Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

January 18, 2011Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Last night was the second meeting of the book club that first met in November to discuss Morley Callaghan’s Such Is My Beloved. In keeping with our plan of following some kind of thread from one book to the next, we moved from that sad story of failed religious idealism to a still sadder–but, perhaps, ultimately more uplifting–one, The Power and the Glory. For all of us, it was our first reading of the novel, and for some of us, our first serious encounter with Graham Greene. I include myself in this last group: I had read The Comedians years ago for an undergraduate class, and my copy of The Power and the Glory has my [unmarried] name and then “88” inscribed in it, as if it too was part of my course readings, but I have no recollection of ever actually having worked through it. That’s it, for me and Graham Greene! (I’ve also seen the movie adaptation of The End of the Affair, but I’d be the first one to insist that doesn’t really count!) It’s hard to imagine that I could have read it and not remembered it: it certainly seems to me now a highly memorable book, the kind of book that leaves deep and not altogether welcome tracks in one’s literary and moral imagination.

As before, our group discussion was wide-ranging and open-ended rather than conclusive, but also as before, the process of hearing a range of ideas and trying out my own helped me sort my preliminary impressions. I am left with a number of uncertainties about the novel, some quite literal (what happened to the girl Coral, for instance? I thought she had died, perhaps from whatever caused her sharp stomach pains, but it turned out other people had not inferred that, and we couldn’t find any specific information), some more abstract (what is the place of women in the moral and religious universe of this novel, for one? except for Coral, they seem mostly very limited in their roles and their agency and are generally peripheral to the novel’s central dramatic conflict–is it a misimpression that in the priest’s struggle between material and spiritual needs, women are sidelined because they belong to the world of the flesh?). But I am also left feeling I appreciate at least some aspects of it, particularly about how its very dreariness–its immersion in corruption, failure, sin, inadequacy, disappointment, dirt, and death–helps us make the same journey the whiskey priest makes towards a particular idea of God and salvation. Listening at one point to the confession of the mestizo who ultimately will betray him, the priest reflects on the unoriginality of his sins, on the mestizo‘s inability to understand that he is “only a typical part” of “a world of treachery, violence, and lust in which his shame was altogether insignificant.” But the moral ugliness of the world illuminates rather than obscures the greatness of God:

It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay in death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization — it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

This is the world–these are the people–for whom the whiskey priest, too, ultimately dies, as, unable to turn away from his duty to a dying Christian, he knowingly allows the mestizo to lead him into a trap. Even before then, he has risked his life repeatedly by hearing confession and performing mass for the motely assortment of variously ugly, corrupt, ignorant, even evil people he encounters on his grim travels. And there is a kind of glory in the fleeting moments of grace he achieves, as well as a kind of heroism in the ruthlessness with which he admits his own inadequacies and failures even as he doggedly serves the God he believes may damn his soul to Hell. He is no saint, if being saintly means transcending the needs and temptations and vulnerabilities of ordinary human life. But if a saint is someone who is fully human and yet who, despite sharing those needs and temptations and flaws, still persists in honoring the ideal he may never reach–then, perhaps, the whiskey priest is closer than he thinks to being “the only thing that counted.” The mother’s story of Juan the Martyr provides an ironic commentary on this perspective on sainthood: our priest, too, may become the subject of such legends and be given in death the purity of heart, the courage, the heroism he lacked in life. But Greene lets us see the superficiality of that simplistic version, which is no more than a story for children. His imperfect man is, I think the lesson is, a perfect priest, truly a man of God.

I found Greene’s prose very effective, especially the unexpected similes which I learned he called “leopards” (because they “leap” at you): “She carried her responsibilities carefully like crockery across the hot yard”; “The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit”; “the watch-tower gaped over their path like an upper jaw”; or, most poignant of all, “He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place”–that’s the line, I think, that will stay with me. For all the spiritual beauty that oozes out, though, from dark scenes such as the priest’s nights in prison or the remarkable mass he performs in the darkness in his home village even as the soldiers draw near–for all that, I found myself repelled by the vision Greene presents, of humanity as well as of religion. I found myself thinking of Swinburne’s lines (in the “Hymn to Proserpine”) expressing horror at the replacement of pagan joy with Christian suffering. “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean;” says his speaker, “the world has grown gray from thy breath”: “O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods; / “O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted gods!” I don’t usually align myself with Swinburne, but Greene’s world is certainly gray and ghastly. I was also reminded of Cardinal Newman (like Greene, of course, a convert to Catholicism) and his eloquent rant about the fallen world he saw around him: “the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary, hopeless irreligion …all this is a vision to dizzy and appal,” from which he draws the conclusion that “if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible calamity.” You don’t need to be a cock-eyed optimist to consider this a very partial account of the world and man’s nature, one that drives us towards hatred and suspicion of ourselves and legitimizes suffering and misery. “I hate your reasons,” the lieutenant says in exasperation to the cornered priest; “If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say — pain’s a good thing, perhaps he’ll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak.” Though Greene doesn’t vilify the lieutenant, he makes him the priest’s antagonist and thus implies, I think, that his principles serve only worldly or material, not moral or religious, interests. But I think in this one thing I’m with the lieutenant, though clearly that goes against the grain of the novel itself. It won’t surprise anyone who knows me or reads my blog that I greatly prefer a moral vision that (rather than offering us a get-out-of-Hell-free card if we repent for our wrongdoing at the last minute, or that expects us to be good under threat of punishment or promise of reward, or in service to the glory of some hypothetical deity) is based on the human capacity for sympathy and the intrinsic value of reducing suffering and increasing joy.

The book we chose for March is The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Graham Greene once called Brian Moore his “favourite living novelist,” and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne apparently contains both excess drinking and a priest, so the two reads are connected in several ways!

Recent Reading: Atkinson, Greene, Kennedy, Simonson

January 16, 2011Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

I have been reading quite a lot, thanks to being on sabbatical, but the irony is that I feel a little overwhelmed and unfocused now, sitting down to try to say something about the books! It may be not so much the quantity of reading, which isn’t really overwhelming; it’s more the motley assortment. But I’m already moving on to the next ones, so if I don’t write at least something now, these ones will recede into the mists of my increasingly imperfect memory. So.

Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog. I enjoyed reading this instalment in Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series almost as much as I enjoyed the first three–almost. Atkinson is fiercely good at characterization and scene setting, and she takes a theme-and-variations approach to plot, so that the overlapping or intersecting stories she tells relate to each other thematically as well as chronologically or historically. The result (as Miriam Burstein explains better and in more detail in her post on this novel) is a book that tests and even refuses some of the conventions of mystery fiction as a genre. This time I found myself starting to get impatient with Atkinson, though: the book seemed to me to lack a certain tautness and the plot served so conspicuously as a vehicle for presenting her cleverly conceived characters that I wondered why she didn’t let go of the pretense of the genre altogether. I realize there may seem to be a certain inconsistency in this, as I have been known to complain about the dully formulaic nature of a lot of mystery novels, and my own reading preference is certainly for those that let go of the constraints of the ‘puzzle’ form and raise the literary stakes–as, for instance, P. D. James and Ian Rankin do. But James has always been explicit that she likes the basic form of the detective novel because of the clear structure it provides, which enables and supports elaboration. I thought Started Early, Took My Dog, with its diffuse attention, nearly fell off the scaffolding.

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory. I’ll write more about this after my book group meets tomorrow night to discuss it. It certainly follows on in an interesting way on our last reading, Morley Callaghan’s Such Is My Beloved: both books are about priests struggling to express and act on their faith according to their own principles when circumstances conspire against them. But the tone of Greene’s book is altogether darker and I founds its idea(l) of religion altogether more elusive. Where is God, in this novel? What are we to make of the whiskey priest, who hardly seems to have a calling or a vocation–indeed, it’s not clear what, exactly, he still believes in–and yet cannot turn his back on what he believes to be his duty, even when he knows it will cost him his life? Are we to read him as a martyr? What kind of a faith is it that glorifies an existence so squalid and pathetic? Where is the power, or the glory?

Margaret Kennedy, The Constant Nymph. This is the first in the cluster of novels by Margaret Kennedy that I’m reading for my little Virago Modern Classics project (mentioned here). I knew almost nothing about Kennedy when I started it, and at this point I feel I know hardly any more now. It’s a very odd novel, nothing like what I expected. For a long time I couldn’t figure out who was the nymph of the title–I was only certain at the end, and then after I went back and looked up the blurb on the Virago website, as my library copy has no jacket information, no introduction, nothing at all to help me figure this weird thing out. The novel’s plot centers on the eccentric family of Albert Sanger (his “circus,” as everyone calls it). Convinced he could not flourish in England, Sanger has exiled himself to Europe and raised his miscellaneous offspring quite free of the inhibitions and values of “civilized” life. The one value they all recognize is music, or perhaps art more generally; they take really nothing else seriously at all. On Sanger’s death his second wife’s relatives step in to act as guardians to the younger children; the cousin who comes out to collect them falls in love with one of Sanger’s friends, another misunderstood musical genius, and their marriage creates the tensions that carry the novel along to its conclusion. Love, in this novel, is not a mutually beneficial or fulfilling relationship but seems to manifest itself almost entirely through a peculiar kind of worship directed by women towards brilliant, creative, anti-social men. Kennedy’s take on this is satirical, I think, but I’m not entirely sure because I found her tone difficult to interpret: she writes with a fairly flat affect, and the only times she rises into anything like compelling language is when she writes about music, which suggests she may, in fact, be aligned, or align the book, more with those who worship the muse than with those who seek worldly compromises. Reading more of her novels may help me get my interpretive bearings better. There’s hardly any critical work on her to help me out, but I have a book coming through interlibrary loan on the Somerville College novelists (of which she was one).

Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. I really enjoyed reading this novel but in the end I think it’s a near miss. It prompted lots of wry laughs, and approaches questions of cultural difference and misunderstanding in a nicely muted and nuanced way, allowing its characters to make fools of themselves rather than setting them up as targets for the novelist’s (or protagonist’s) rebukes–at her best, Simonson handles this much as, say, Jane Austen does, allowing us to enjoy our superiority as we root for the happiness of Major Pettigrew and Mrs Ali. The lead up to the dinner/dance–the theme of which, the ladies of the club decide, is to be “An Evening at the Mughal Court”–and then the calamitous events of that night, are beautifully handled. Here’s a little excerpt that will give you an idea of the artfully artless style of the book:

“We were reminded of the story of your father and his brave service to the Maharajah. We’ve decided to do it in three or four scenes. It’ll be the perfect core of our entertainment.”

“No, no, no,” the Major said. He felt quite faint at the idea. “My father was in India in the thirties and early forties.”

“Yes?” said Daisy.

“The Mughal Empire died out around 1750,” said the Major, his exasperation overcoming his politeness. “So you see it doesn’t go at all.”

“Well, it’s all the same thing,” said Daisy. “It’s all India, isn’t it?”

“But it’s not the same at all,” said the Major. “The Mughals–that’s Shah Jehan and the Taj Mahal. My father served at Partition. That’s the end of the English in India.”

“So much the better,” said Daisy. “We’ll just change ‘Mughal’ to ‘Maharajah’ and celebrate how we gave India and Pakistan their independence. Dawn of a new era and all that. I think it’s the only sensitive option.”

“That would solve the costume problem for a lot of people,” said Alma. “I was trying to tell Hugh Whetstone that pith helmets weren’t fully developed until the nineteenth century, but he didn’t want to hear it. If we add an element of ‘Last Days,’ they can wear their ‘Charles Dickens’ summer dresses if they prefer.” […]

“Partition was 1947,” said the Major. “People wore uniforms and short frocks.”

“We’re not trying to be rigidly historical, Major,” said Daisy.

At the event itself, Mrs Ali’s deadpan responses offset the absurdity perfectly:

“The Maharajah’s wife throws herself upon the protection of the British officer,” said Daisy’s voice again. “He is only one man, but by God he is an Englishman.” A round of cheers broke out in the audience.

“Isnt’ it exciting?” said Mrs Jakes. “I’ve got goose bumps.”

“Perhaps it’s an allergic reaction,” said Mrs. Ali in a mild voice. “The British Empire may cause that.”

The relationship between the upright, stiff, but good-hearted Major, with his old world courtesy and literary inclinations, and the astute but reticent outsider Mrs Ali is developed at once believably and sympathetically. Simonson does well with her secondary characters too, particularly the Major’s insufferable son and his American girlfriend–who is, thankfully, redeemed from reductive stereotypes after a scene or two. But I didn’t understand the turn towards melodrama at the end of the book, or why, if some kind of crisis was felt to be necessary, it took quite the form it did. Perhaps Simonson felt she should balance her satirical treatment of the shallow English villagers with some equal opportunity mockery (if that’s what it is) of the values that lead to ‘honor’ killings, but I felt that this very troubling episode threw the book off balance. I was interested that Simonson chose Kipling as the author who drew the Major and Mrs Ali together. I haven’t read any Kipling beyond snippets of (jingoistic) verse, but the part he plays here, along with Ahdaf Souief’s allusions to him in her novels (including the title of In the Eye of the Sun) make me think he’s worth taking a closer look at.

SATC2

January 11, 2011December 12, 2021Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

sex_and_the_city_2_dvd This weekend I finally watched Sex and the City 2. Though I have some book blogging to get around to, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the movie, so I thought I’d puzzle over it a little here before returning to business as usual.

First, I should say that I like the series Sex and the City quite a lot. This was (still is, in a way) a surprise to me. It’s one of those cases, as with reading books by authors I don’t already know, in which serendipity played a part in winning me over: I stumbled on some reruns of Season 6 a couple of years ago and got caught up, partly in Carrie’s romance with Baryshnikov (a long-time crush! remember The Turning Point?)—and the conflict that develops between his emotional and professional needs and hers—but also in Miranda’s domestic struggles (including finding compassion for her increasingly senile mother-in-law), in Samantha’s breast cancer, and in the saga of Charlotte’s adoption efforts. These were all storylines in which much more was at stake than I expected from my casual impression of the show. After that, I rented the earlier seasons and watched them all through—I’ve now seen the whole series a couple of times and I own a couple of seasons on DVD (and some episodes on iTunes) so I can turn to them when I’m in the mood for that particular kind of diversion. Season 4 and Season 6 are my favorites, because I think they take the characters to the most interesting places (figuratively, not literally). If I’d seen Season 1 first, I don’t know that I would have kept watching, as I find it more superficial and deliberately provocative than the later seasons. Sure, there’s something refreshing about its frankness, but as the writers apparently realized, you need more than that to sustain a series, and characters (like people) need to grow up and move on.

Pink_Birkin_bag A lot gets made (often, in my experience, by people [mostly men] who don’t actually watch SATC) of the show’s emphasis on expensive clothes and shoes. Though I have never bought an expensive pair of shoes (and never any with heels higher than about two inches) and have very little interest in fashion, I actually enjoy watching the characters play dress-up—which is really how it strikes me, like a game of Disney Princess for grown-ups. In many ways, not just this one, the characters live in a fantasy world that has no relation to what I experience as real life, but the same is true of all kinds of shows and movies, and I’m perfectly capable of separating my own values and priorities from theirs: I feel no inadequacy over my lack of Christian Louboutin pumps or a Birkin bag, and if I ever had a great condo in New York (if only!), I’d fill it with books, not couture. That said, there are some aspects of SATC that (though unusually well accessorized) do bear significantly on real issues, such as the challenges of reconciling femininity with power and financial success, of dealing with success imbalances in relationships, or just of maintaining one’s own identity at work (or at play, really) given the pressure women feel to conform or please. Season 2’s “The Caste System” is sharp as well as funny about the pretense that there is no such thing as ‘class’ in contemporary America, while in Season 6, Carrie’s purchase of a Prada shirt for Berger (like Miranda’s earlier attempt to buy Steve a good suit) precipitates a romantic crisis based on his inability to accept something women have been expected or conditioned to accept for centuries, namely economic inferiority.

SATC But by far the most important aspect of the series, its most potent fantasy, is its model of female friendship. More unrealistic even than Carrie’s affording a closet full of Dior and Manolo Blahniks on her freelancer’s income is the whole premise that four women who are such completely different types would be soulmates. Their acceptance of each other’s differences and their often explicit insistence that, though they may question or test them, they will always ultimately support each other’s choices—well, again, that’s a potent fantasy. To be sure, it’s not only women who feel pressure to apologize for who they are and what they want, but I think women experience this pressure more intensely, in more circumstances or situations, than most men. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha feel it too, and to varying degrees all of them—except Samantha—struggle to persist with the way of being in the world that they think is right for them as individuals. How to do this and not be labelled, or to feel, simply selfish is a central problem of the series. That Samantha is miraculously unapologetic for her own independence, not to mention her sexual appetites, makes her at once the least familiar or likable character and the most radical, and I have sometimes thought it’s a shame that she expresses her defiance of convention so much through sex, which I think distracts from the political potential of her character and makes it easy to confuse her with the negative stereotype of the ‘slut.’ But from another angle, that’s precisely the point of the show: to present four very different women who have sex, like sex, pursue sex, talk about sex—and to refuse the moral judgments and double-standards that insist on dividing women into categories (good/bad, virgin/whore) based on their sexual conduct. SATC also, notoriously, reverses the gaze, turning men into objects for women’s voyeurism, something male actors who have been on the show have remarked as unsettling. Ethically that’s probably no improvement on the endless objectification of women in art, film, and advertising—but I don’t see that ending any time soon, and I think it does make a difference that in SATC this strategy is inevitably self-conscious and tinged with irony, just because it is far less familiar. And it is complemented by the sheer pleasure the women of SATC take in their own bodies, highlighted by the way they dress as well as by their active sex lives. Like any long-running show, SATC has better and worse episodes, but at its best I think it’s both intelligent and funny, and I appreciate the way it showcases strong, vocal women who, miraculously, love each other just the way they are.*

SATC-movie So, about SATC2. Well, actually, first a few words about SATC1. It strikes some really unfortunate squirm-inducing notes (most of them during the ‘honeymoon’ getaway), but overall it does a good job, I think, of trying to imagine the next steps and crises for the four women. Many of the same issues of power, balance, and independence arise; friendships as well as relationships are tested. Some of the tricks that work well in a half-hour episode get too thin stretched to feature length, but there’s some genuine feeling—some real pathos—as well as some comedy. And most important it’s still about women and friendship and acceptance, about taking strength from differences and trying to see the way forward. It’s not a great film—while I think the series has, or will have, classic standing, the film does not do enough as a film to be really significant. Still, on balance I enjoyed it, and I’ve watched it more than once—and will probably, some day, watch it again.

I think SATC2, on the other hand, is a pretty bad film—and I also found it quite depressing. I don’t think it’s bad for the same reasons Roger Ebert (for one) said it was bad (and wow, is his review vitriolic); I agree with Opinioness Megan and the other critics she cites who think that the hate directed at the film reflects a double-standard by which women’s escapism is condemned while men’s is the stuff of putatively heroic legends. I think it’s a bad film because the pacing is awkward (not just slow but kind of staggering, lurching from scene to scene), the acting is forced, the storylines are thin, and the whole thing runs on an edge of desperation, as if the makers were under orders to Be Confrontational! Be Shocking! Be Funny! Have a Touching Moment! Sing Karaoke! For me, everything just kept not working, despite what seemed like painstaking efforts to check off all these elements. The most glaring example is Samantha’s declaration that “we are soulmates,” which ought to epitomize the emphasis on female bonding that makes the series so special, but which instead came across as unnatural (for Samantha—that’s not her vocabulary, surely!) and contrived, a case in which showing would have sufficed, in fact, without anyone needing to tell each other, or us, what we know perfectly well from years of watching the show.

I agree with Megan about the Eurocentrism of the film, and I would add that it falls into a sordid kind of Orientalism—but having said that, the idea of connecting the American women’s experiences of frustrated self-expression and autonomy (epitomized, without subtlety, in the silencing hand of Miranda’s boss) to veiling is not an altogether stupid one. (One clumsy moment in the development of this theme is Miranda’s observation on the woman eating french fries one at a time by slipping them discreetly under her veil–something to the effect of “that’s what men really want from us.”) It just would have required much more care and nuance to develop the question of how or whether there are in fact parallels, or to what extent freedom and self-expression should be equated with the kinds of overt display and self-indulgence characteristic of SATC as a series. Along those lines, the scene in which “our” four bond with several veiled Muslim women who reveal fashionable couture outfits beneath their robes not only proposes that there may be common interests across cultural divides (ones that the film to that point has only crudely exploited)—it also suggests that there are many ways to inhabit, negotiate and subvert gendered rules and roles. SATC typically celebrates saying exactly what you think when you think it; imagine what a good film this might have been if instead of promoting that ideal it had taken the opportunity to explore its possible limits and liabilities. All the stupid falling-off-a-camel / getting-arrested-for-indecency stuff could have been overcome, or at least offset, by some intelligent use of the film’s “exotic” setting—but instead, we get mostly cheap fish-out-of-water gimmicks and some nice shots of the desert. And some pretty cool outfits, of course.

SATC-2 So it’s not a good film. It tries, but it fails (or so I thought) to keep up the girls’-night-out energy of the series, and even the gaiety seemed forced. Still, I couldn’t help thinking, as I watched it, that there was something brave about it, because though it stumbles, it is stumbling around in the difficult territory of telling stories about women after the usual happily-ever-after moments of marriage and motherhood. And I think this is why I ultimately found it, not offensive, but depressing. Each of the women faces a fairly realistic mid-life problem, and the writers are not wrong to try to imagine their way out of these scenarios. Carrie seemed particularly whiney to me in this film, but the challenge she and Big face of how to design a marriage that isn’t so full of compromises that neither of them is happy—well, that’s a real challenge, and their solution (taking “days off”) is interesting because it breaks away from the current oppressive myth that two people can and should be completely happy with each other while being together 24/7. It struck me as appropriate that Carrie’s old apartment provides the means, not only for them to get a breather from togetherness, but also for Charlotte to get a little me-time away from her children. Throughout the series and on into the first movie, Carrie has never quite given up that apartment—it represents autonomy, her room of her own.

Ebert is far too literal when he condemns Charlotte for the episode in which Lily puts red handprints on her vintage Valentino: of course it’s stupid to wear designer clothes while decorating cupcakes, but the real point in that scene is that being a parent is exhausting and, occasionally, demoralizing, not least because it keeps you from being the person you used to be—which is what that skirt represents to her. It’s impossible to anticipate, before you have children, the range of things you will give up for them and because of them. Of course, there are many much greater things you gain, but sometimes surely all parents have wondered where that other person, the one they used to be, has gone–along with that other life they used to lead! And I wouldn’t be surprised if most parents cling to some symbolic reminders, too, things they fret over and protect from the innocently destructive hands of their beloved offspring. (I certainly have some, though they aren’t items of clothing; I would be devastated, however irrationally, if they were destroyed.) I actually thought the big red handprints on Charlotte’s (unrealistically tight!) butt in her (absurdly chosen!) white skirt were apt and pretty funny symbols, in this context. SATC-movie2

SATC2, then, deliberately debunks some popular myths of romantic bliss and maternal fulfilment. What’s sad is that it doesn’t really seem to know what to replace them with: what stories should it tell of its four protagonists? To have done a good job, maybe it would have needed to break out of its genre and embrace the complexities of mature women’s lives. It should have gone to work, not on vacation, with Miranda, for example. It should have followed through on the new model of marriage Carrie and Big propose, rather than reducing it to a fade-out at the end. It should have had Samantha prove her power, not reduced her to waving handfuls of condoms in the face of aghast Muslim men—or to a woman too lacking in self-awareness to agree that the dress she’s chosen is, in fact, “too young” for her. In SATC1, she decides—contrary to all romantic comedy rules–that she’d rather be alone than with her hot Hollywood-star boyfriend: “the most important relationship I have is with myself.” The Samantha of SATC2 shows no such self-respect.

Unlike Megan, then, I found this movie a lot less fun and escapist than the first one. It seemed permeated with Samantha’s fear of growing old, and it focuses on women who dream of escaping but who go home again without having learned or accomplished anything. I feel as if the movie let them down as well as me. Is it really so hard to carry forward the irrepressible feistiness that characterizes the series? I’m not sorry I saw it, but I don’t expect I’ll watch it again. On the other hand, it might be time to go back through Season 4 . . .

*Remember the toast in Bridget Jones’s Diary,to Bridget just as she is? More evidence that acceptance is the real fantasy!

Novel Readings

Rohan Amanda Maitzen – Reader, Professor, Critic

Month: January 2011