Month: June 2011

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Cakes and Ale is the latest reading selection for the Slaves of Golconda group. I think I read Of Human Bondage years ago, but I have no recollection of it, so at this point Cakes and Ale represents the sum total of my knowledge of W. Somerset Maugham’s oeuvre. Based on what I know about Of Human Bondage, though, it would be a mistake to attempt any generalizations about Maugham based on Cakes and Ale–so I won’t!

Cakes and Ale struck me as quite an odd book. It has many passages in it that are amusing, interesting, and eminently quotable, such as the set pieces on the role of beauty in art and criticism, or on the place of the first-person singular in the art of fiction. The book is about a writer writing about a writer, narrated by another writer; between this set up and the embedded commentaries on fiction and criticism, the book overall seems as if it must be metafiction of some kind, and yet it doesn’t seem so, and this is one reason I found it odd: I can’t quite see how to connect all this self-referential potential with the story the novel tells about Edward Driffield and his putatively enchanting first wife Rosie, bar-maid turned society beauty turned scandalous absconder. That is, the metafictional commentary doesn’t seem to be saying anything about the kind of book Cakes and Ale actually is. I suppose this means it isn’t metafictional after all but incidental, just the kind of stuff a narrating writer would write about. Here’s a bit from the excursus on first-person narration, for instance:

A little while ago I read in the Evening Standard an article by Mr Evelyn Waugh in the course of which he remarked that to write novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. . . . I was much concerned, and forthwith asked Alroy Kear (who reads everything, even the books he writes prefaces for) to recommend to me some works on the art of fiction. On his advice I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr E. M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr E. M. Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all.

Amusing, as I said. Ashenden goes on to conclude that the value of first-person narration is that in an increasingly confusing life, it makes sense to focus on our own limited experience, which is, after all, all we can really be sure of and hope to understand. Yet Cakes and Ale is not really about him, is it? Or, is it? If so, it does a good job effacing his part in it: he’s a Nick Carraway type, significant (or so it seems) primarily as a device for delivering Maugham’s gentle literary and social satire and for telling us about other people, especially Driffield and Rosie.

Driffield, too, is a fairly absent main character: in his case he seems to be there to provide the occasion for the literary commentary, as well as for some pretty funny stuff about the rise and fall of literary reputations and the dubious reliability of critical judgments. Ashenden does not admire Driffield much himself:

But of course what the critics wrote about Edward Driffield was eyewash. His outstanding merit was not the realism that gave vigour to his work, nor the beauty that informed it, nor his graphic portraits of seafaring men, nor his poetic descriptions of salty marshes, of storm and calm, and of nestling habits; it was his longevity. . . But why writers should be more esteemed the older they grow, has long perplexed me. . . . After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of an author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all. As they grown older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author who wrote them.

Let’s not start naming contemporary authors we think might be unduly revered for just this reason! Again, this is funny, with just enough sting to make it interesting too. But the novel does not give the issue of literary merit any momemtum as a theme (by, say, really focusing on whether Driffield does have any genius besides longevity), and I don’t think it also takes it on as a formal problem by trying to embody in its own narrative any special genius.

The only element of the novel that has much forward momentum is the story of Rosie–but to me, she was too flat a character, and too representative of a kind of male fantasy of undemanding available amoral female sexuality, to captivate me the way she (to me, inexplicably) enchants young Ashenden. So enamoured is he that even after she has run off with the coal merchant of Blackstable and started a new life as Mrs Iggulden in America, he defends her for having “carried on” behind Driffield’s back: “She was a very simple woman. Her instincts were healthy and ingenuous. She loved to make people happy. She loved love.” Challenged on this sappy conclusion (“Do you call that love?”), he responds,

Well, then, the act of love. She was naturally affectionate. When she liked anyone, it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not vice; it wasn’t lasciviousness; it was her nature. She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume. It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others. It had no effect on her character; she remained sincere, unspoiled, and artless.

Well, not so artless she doesn’t welcome the gift of a very expensive fur cloak from one of her lovers, and not so fond of giving pleasure to others that she hesitates before causing them pain. Her acts have little effect on her character because Maugham (or Ashenden) gives her very little character to begin with. The absence of complexity in her personality is not liberating: it’s limiting, if you intend the portrait to be in any way related to reality. But maybe Rosie isn’t intended to be more than an animated, good-natured fantasy figure. Or maybe there’s something dimly progressive about the freedom with which she enjoys her own sexuality, and about Maugham’s (or, again, Ashenden’s) refusal to judge her for it–but I’m not convinced.

And yet–near the end we learn a bit more about Rosie’s history, something that adds darker shades to the radiant glow in which she always seems bathed (her skin is so “dewy” that at one point Ashenden asks if she rubs vaseline on it). More interesting still, that sad past is linked to the one novel of Driffield’s that Ashenden particularly admires, for having a “cold ruthlessness that in all the sentimentality of English fiction strikes an unusual note.” This novel, The Cup of Life, is also the novel that drew censure down on the novelist for being “gratuitously offensive [and] obscene.” The incident in the novel that so outrages the righteous public turns out to be taken almost straight from life. So perhaps there is a metafictional angle after all, and it turns on Rosie: perhaps her story, and her character, with its overt and unapologetic sensuality, is a challenge to Maugham’s (or Ashenden’s?) readers, to see, for instance, if they will appreciate her beauty without decrying her morality, or find beauty in her freedom from social constraints. Is the novel about the relationship between beauty and virtue? Does that help us make sense of the title? But again, I’m not convinced, because I just don’t find Rosie, or the novel as a whole, for that matter, substantive enough to hang a theory on.

The novel is funny, though, if only in strange fits and starts, so to close, another of the many quotable passages, this time about a poet who becomes, for a time, the rage of London literary society:

Now that he is so completely forgotten and the critics who praised him would willingly eat their words if they were not carefully guarded in the files of innumerable newspaper offices, the sensation he made with his first volume of poems is almost unbelievable. The most important papers gave to reviews of it as much space as they would have to the report of a prize-fight, the most influential critics fell over one another in their eagerness to welcome him. They likened him to Milton (for the sonority of his blank verse), to Keats (for the opulence of his sensuous imagery), and to Shelley (for his airy fantasy); and, using him as a stick to beat idols of whom they were weary, they gave in his name many a resounding whack on the emaciated buttocks of Lord Tennyson and a few good husky smacks on the bald pate of Robert Browning. The public fell like the walls of Jericho.

Maybe fun is the key: Maugham had an idea for Rosie, he tells us in his Preface, and wanted a book to put her in, and he also had a lot of experience with the vagaries and vapidities of literary celebrity and the satirical skill to write them up elegantly. Why not put these ingredients together into a little confection of a book?

I’m sure I’ll learn from the discussion. Anyone interested is welcome to join in; usually we cross-post at the Slaves of Golconda blog, and there’s contact information there for those who also want to participate in the forum as well.

Catching Up: Bookish Miscellany, with a Special Note on Loins

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

I haven’t done a lot of focused reading in the past week or so–I blame (but very much welcomed!) my visiting parents, for diverting me with conversation. I also blame my daughter, who celebrated her 10th birthday on the weekend–an occasion involving much festivity but also, in advance, much planning, bustling, and shopping. Not that we did anything particularly fancy for it (not like last year’s bouncy castle, which really was quite a big deal). This year we had a “pajama day” party, with pillows and “stuffies” and movies, all very cozy. Of course, it would turn out to be the one beautiful sunny day in about a month! But everyone seemed to enjoy curling up to watch, and then we had games (‘freeze dance’ is a ritual favorite with this crowd) and pizza and ice cream sundaes with all the peanut-free toppings I could think of (Maddie’s very allergic).

I have been gathering books to read, though, and puttering through some of them, especially various books (fiction and non-fiction) about Richard III, as I think through what my essay will be about. I haven’t kept up with Ricardian novels since about 1985, and it turns out there have been quite a few, so I’ve been searching them out at the library and taking a look. At this point I’m not inclined to pay much attention to these “new” ones in my essay because they seem, well, awful. I suppose they aren’t, really. What they are is pedestrian and unconvincing. That said, I’ve been wondering: are the old books I cherish, including the two I just reread (The Broken Sword and The White Boar) really any better, or do I just read them through sentimental eyes? I think they are better. For one thing, by and large they avoid tedious attempts to make the characters sound medieval by having them speak in stilted, artificially antique dialogue–like this, from the page that happens to be open in front of me: “Ay, young Richard has proved a good student of arms. I do hear he wields a fierce sword.” You do hear that, do you? 15th-century speakers would have sounded perfectly idiomatic to themselves: I think that (for any but the most ingenious and talented writers) the smartest choice is to make them sound perfectly idiomatic to us, and to let the strangeness of their world-view come through in some other way. An old-fashioned oath or two is fine, and certainly allusions to period details of clothing, food, ritual, whatever. But stay away from ” ‘Tis unnatural in the eyes of God what they are doing” or “Certes, ’tis hard to explain.” Rather than creating an air of authenticity, this kind of labored stuff distances us–or me, at least–from the characters whose immediacy is crucial to our imaginative engagement with the novel. And for crying out loud, leave their loins out of it: across just a few pages of my current example, Anne Easter Smith’s A Rose for the Crown, we get “his exposed loins telling the tale,” “Kate’s loins all but melted into her shaky knees,” and “she experienced the familiar flutter in her heart and stomach that affected her loins.” Our heroine Kate has yet to get passionate with Richard of Gloucester, but I have a familiar flutter of my own that says loins will once more be involved, though maybe this time they’ll keep quiet and stay above the knees. I am hopeful that Jean Plaidy’s The Reluctant Queen will be better. I read and reread Plaidy’s novels as a teenager and have often regretted having discarded most of my collection over the course of many moves. This particular one is unknown to me, though: it is a late one, early 1990s, I think. (One of the unexpected convergences of my thesis research was discovering that the reason Agnes Strickland’s 1840s series Lives of the Queens of England seemed so familiar to me was that Strickland was one of Plaidy’s main sources.) I also dug up Sandra Worth’s The King’s Daughter and took Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen as I roamed the library, as both are at least peripherally about Richard and the Princes in the Tower.

One book I did get through, because I was writing it up for the summer reading feature we’re preparing at Open Letters and I couldn’t resist refreshing my memory, is Pauline Gedge’s The Eagle and the Raven. This is another old favorite, and again it raises the question of how far sentiment affects my judgment. I think I could find passages in The Eagle and the Raven that are as banal and cliched as any in A Rose for the Crown–but overall, I really do think it is fiction of a different order, richer, more challenging, more imaginatively rich. I can’t be quite sure, though, because about half way through it I developed an unnerving tendency to start weeping over every loss or betrayal in the plot, which means over most of the second part of the book. I can certainly be this kind of emotional reader (I’m a Victorianist, remember–I always cry at the end of A Tale of Two Cities too), but I wondered if it was really the tragic failures of the ancient Britons in their struggle against the Roman Empire that made me cry this time: I was full of memories, because of my parents’ visit, and emotionally stirred from reflecting on Maddie’s first completed decade, and The Eagle and the Raven is one of the books that made a great impression on me in my younger years, so that reading it was never just about the book but always about some volatile combination of who I was, who I am now, where I am now (literally and figuratively), and so on. How could I possibly assess its literary quality in these circumstances? And, I suppose, why would I really want to? I loved rereading it, so much that I think I may soon reread Gedge’s first novel, Child of the Morning, about Hatshepsut, Egypt’s only woman pharaoh–another old-time favorite.

Among the other books I have collected for my TBR pile recently is Testament of a Generation, the collected journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: I ordered “a lovely copy” through Abebooks (actually, from Silver Tree Books in Malvern, in the UK), and it finally arrived once the postal dispute was concluded (I won’t say “settled,” since it wasn’t, not properly). I’m more interested in reading this than in reading any more about Brittain and Holtby just yet, but I’ve also got Testament of Experience waiting. My mother and I had a nice browse at the Jade *W* downtown, too, and while she took home about 5 more books about Virginia Woolf to add to her impressive collection as well as their copy of Ursula Nordstrom’s Dear Genius (which I really hope she enjoys–I rather urged it on her!), I took Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows and This Real Night from their well-hidden Virago section.

First up for some sustained attention, though–which will have to be tomorrow–is Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale for the Slaves of Golconda. It is worrisome to me that I read this barely a month ago (mistakenly thinking that was our deadline) and can barely recall it now!  But I’m sure it will all come back to me, especially since I see I made some helpful little notes in the back of my copy.

And that’s a start on getting back to blogging. I was actually starting to feel quite fretful about not having written anything here for so long, not because I felt guilty but because I felt sort of pent up, even with nothing in particular to write about.

 

 

Summer Rerun: Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

It has been quiet around here, as I have been busy with family visitors and special events–including my daughter’s 10th birthday party. I’ll be back in business soon! In the meantime, I’ve been hearing a lot about Ann Patchett’s new novel, State of Wonder, and that made me think again about how much I was moved and surprised by Bel Canto, which I wrote up after reading it back in 2008. I have so many other books I’m excited to read that so far I’ve resisted buying State of Wonder, but I’m not sure how much longer I can hold out–or why I should, at that.

Bel Canto is a beautiful, poignant, and fragile novel about the beauty, poignancy, and fragility of art and love. The simplicity of its narrative suits the underlying simplicity of its ideas: that music can transcend differences, for instance, or that art and love and beauty matter and should be nourished and shared.

In the early parts of the novel, these insights, which sound hackneyed stated so baldly, nonetheless come upon the characters as surprises borne in upon them by the extremity of their circumstances. Even Mr. Hosokawa, whose love of opera brings soprano Roxanne Coss to the party aborted so dramatically when the guests are taken hostage, has a complex life to which music can be only an accessory, an indulgence that makes a gift of a few days home with food poisoning: “He remembered this time as happily as any vacation because he played Handel’s Alcina continually, even while he slept.” The party itself is a business occasion: Mr. Hosokawa is “the founder and chairman of Nansei, the largest electronics corporation in Japan,” and “the host country” hopes he can be seduced into investing, perhaps even building a factory. Only Mr. Hosokawa is there only to hear Roxanne Coss sing–and as it turns out, only he is there for the right reason, the only reason that matters. And yet, her singing propels the other guests beyond business to love:

They were so taken by the beauty of her voice that they wanted to cover her mouth with their mouth, drink in. Maybe music could be transferred, devoured, owned. What would it mean to kiss the lips that had held such a sound?

Some of them had loved her for years. They had every recording she had ever made. They kept a notebook and wrote down every place they had seen her, listing the music, the names of the cast, the conductor. There were others there that night who had not heard her name, who would have said, if asked, that they would much rather pass three hours in a dentist’s chair. These were the ones who wept openly now, the ones who had been so mistaken.

In retrospect, we realize that this transformation captures the essence of the novel. But because this moment of intense aesthetic and erotic passion coincides with the moment the terrorists cut the lights, it initially seems associated with weakness or vulnerability, especially as the guests continue applauding. This impression builds as the guests in their party finery are surrounded by gun-toting guerillas who first take rough command of the house and then order their hostages to lie down; the guests are relieved, “like small dogs trying to avoid a fight.” Easy oppositions lurk, ready to cheapen the novel’s effects: music, refinement, civilization, under siege by bullets, brutality, savagery.

But (and what do we expect, in a novel called Bel Canto?) the music connects, rather than divides, guests from intruders. Quickly we learn, for example, that the uneducated terrorists (“No one having explained opera, or what it was to sing other than the singing that was done in a careless way . . . No one having explained anything”) have been emotionally overwhelmed (or is it undermined?) by listening to Roxanne Coss from their hiding places in the air-conditioning vents:

When a girl in their village had a pretty voice, one of the old women would say she had swallowed a bird, and this was what they tried to say to themselves as they looked at the pile of hairpins resting on the pistachio chiffon of her gown: she has swallowed a bird. But they knew it wasn’t true. In all their ignorance, in all their unworldliness, they knew there had never been such a bird.

And so it begins: an impossible, unrealistic, dream-like sequence in which, bit by bit, the underlying humanity of each character surfaces. The stale-mate of the hostage-taking, which maroons many men, one woman, and two girls of wildly different nationalities, backgrounds, and characters in a bizarre suspension from ordinary life, gradually liberates them to seek new loves, mostly of music, but also of each other; it’s a brave (but, we always understand, endangered) new world in which the worst come to lack conviction and the best discover their passionate intensity.

The sad but fundamental implausibility of all this requires that we suspend not only our disbelief but, to some extent, our critical faculties, liberating ourselves, you might say, to test and extend the limits of our own artistic sensibilities, to consider seriously, for instance, that song might, in its own way, be wielded as a weapon against petty tyranny:

In retrospect, it was a risky thing to do, both from the perspective of General Alfredo [a leader of the terrorists], who might have seen it as an act of insurrection, and from the care of the instrument of the voice itself. She had not sung in two weeks, nor did she go through a single scale to warm up. Roxanne Coss . . . stood in the middle of the vast living room and began to sing “O Mio Babbino Caro” from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. . . . All of the love and longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear . . . .

Roxanne took a deep breath and rolled her shoulders. “Tell him,” she said to Gen, “that’s it. Either he gives me that box right now or you will not hear another note out of me or that piano for the duration of this failed social experiment.”

How can it work? What can such a threat possibly mean to a man such as General Alfredo? Even he does not know, for the music has “confused him to the point of senselessness.” The stupidity of opposing art with violence incapacitates the Generals, as General Benjamin points out when they consider how to reassert complete control:

“If we put a gun to her head she would sing all day.”

“Try it first with a bird,” General Benjamin said gently to Alfredo. “Like our soprano, they have no capacity to understand authority. The bird doesn’t know enough to be afraid and the person holding the gun will only end up looking like a lunatic.”

However artificial the forms of art may seem (and surely opera is among the most contrived), over and over here the association is with nature, with transparency, with revelation. One of the loveliest epiphanic moments, less melodramatic than Roxanne’s confrontation with Alfredo, is Kato’s ascension from “a vice president at Nansei,” a man known “for being very good with numbers,” to pianist and accompanist. Kato’s playing of Chopin brings the young fighter Carmen to a new life; another terrorist, Cesar, is inspired and finds his own voice. Love and beauty are contagious in this novel. We are all either musicians or music-lovers, Patchett seems to be saying: isn’t that enough to allow us to live together?

Even within the novel, though, the answer has to be that it is not enough, and the certainty of tragedy on an operatic scale haunts the novel from the beginning. This is one cause of what I referred to as the novel’s fragility: it imagines impossibilities, dreams and hopes drawn from yearnings its readers may well recognize from their own encounters with art, especially with music, but its characters recognize, as do we, that theirs is not the real world. We are reminded of this by the recurrent visits of the Red Cross negotiator, Messner, painfully aware that the military is literally undermining the paradisaical garden in which hostages and terrorists play soccer. He knows, and they know, and we know, that they can’t in fact live there forever, despite Carmen’s prayer that “God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.”

On the novel’s own terms, this kind of fragility adds to the beauty and poignancy of the situation: like fine lace or delicate filigree, the loves that form inspire a protective tenderness, a desire to save them from tearing or breaking. I think there is a further kind of fragility to Bel Canto as well, though, that is potentially more problematic because it arises from the novel’s deliberate distancing from history and politics. Take the refusal to place the novel in any particular time or place. As I noted, it’s always just “the host country”; the terrorists’ grievances and demands are boilerplate, even stereotyped; the government is an implacable yet vague force against them. This separation from real-world politics is necessary to preserve the fable-like sensibility of the novel, yet it undermines its credibility and perhaps even its own arguments: the solution the novel implicitly proposes is, after all, to real-world problems, isn’t it? But to imagine a way out of them, it has to leave them altogether behind, or reduce the conflict to the simplistic oppositions between beauty and power, art and guns, that seemed to have been avoided earlier: the only difference at the end is that by and large the terrorists too have been converted, seduced away from politics by love and opera. The novel also skips over any possible association of music in general and opera in particular with history or politics. Verdi, for instance, to whom Mr. Hosokawa is so loyal (Rigoletto is his first opera, and he “never forgot the importance of Verdi in his life”) was a hero of Italian nationalism; crowds at his funeral procession sang the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Nabucco. Opera may once have been a popular form, but today too it is inseparably associated (however justly or unjustly) with cultural and economic elites of just the kind attending the party at the Vice Presidential mansion. Do these considerations matter to the affective or aesthetic aspects of opera? I’m not sure, but there’s something a bit naive and wishful about ignoring them completely in a novel that pits opera against so many of the brutalities and vulgarities of modern life. This naivete is echoed in the extra materials at the end of my edition, which include a piece by Patchett called “How to Fall in Love with Opera”:

The fact is we need opera. We especially need it now. It is an enormous, passionate, melodramatic affair that puts the little business of our lives into perspective. . . . Opera, more than any other art form [really? even novels?] has the sheer muscle and magnitude to pull us into another world, and while that world may be as fraught with heartache as our own, it is infinitely more gorgeous.

As a life-long opera lover* who loves to bliss out to the Sutherland-Horne recording of “Mira, O Norma,” of course I agree. But I recognize that my bliss is based on escape, and while it may be escape into something transcendent and “gorgeous,” I’m not comfortable using it to measure the rest of my life.

And, speaking of being a life-long opera lover, I thought Bel Canto betrayed some signs of its author having (as she admits) come to opera relatively late. For one thing, Roxanne Coss’s repertoire is entirely predictable, from “O Mio Babbino Caro” to the “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka. I suppose familiar tracks were meant as a way to make the novel’s emphasis on opera (to some, as initially to Patchett, an esoteric expertise) user-friendly. Still, the risk is that the transcendent aesthetic moments in the novel approach cliche to the knowledgeable reader. (My own operatic taste is quite mainstream, but even I might have sought out arias with more thematic resonance–facing Alfredo with “Vissi d’arte” instead, for example, an area which does come up later on but more incidentally). Patchett points to Renee Fleming as one of her favourite singers (“I came to believe that Renee Fleming was the living embodiment of art”), a feeling I certainly second, but like Mr. Hosokawa, she shows little historical reach in her other recommendations, and even Fleming, whose voice is certainly beautiful, is no better to my ear, and maybe not as breathtaking, as early recordings of Leontyne Price or Montserrat Caballe. But here, of course, I’m heading well away from the novel (and into the dangerous waters of opera fandom, where everyone notoriously steers by their own stars).

The final weakness I felt in the novel was its epilogue. Patchett should have had the courage of her operatic predecessors and ended with her catastrophe, which I found painful, shocking, and inevitable. Tragic operas don’t rescue you from the emotional impact of their conclusions. Alfredo does not find consolation in Flora’s arms for the loss of Violetta; Rodolfo has no second chance at love after Mimi’s death; nobody responds to Pinkerton’s anguished cries of “Butterfly!” as he rushes upon her corpse; Amneris does not force open the tomb and give Radames a second chance he wouldn’t want anyway. Operatic love is total; there are no compromises. Perhaps Patchett could not accommodate this aspect of opera into her utopian vision, but the result of the epilogue for me was not the sustenance of hope but the bathos of anti-climax.

That said, I carried Bel Canto around for several days after I finished it. I wanted to read parts of it again and again; I needed to think about it; and I was sorry it ended, sorry its dream was over.

*Life-long, you ask? Not really an exaggeration: I still cherish an LP of highlights from La Traviata I got for my 5th birthday and had signed by La Stupenda herself in 1976 (I was 9).

Assignment Sequences: 19th-Century Fiction

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I have one week left of my sabbatical. That in itself is probably a good subject for its own post: the time is coming for a full reckoning of what I did and didn’t get done in the last six months. But it’s also probably the reason that I have just had my first teaching dream in months! Teaching isn’t actually the first routine chore I’ll be getting back to: I have a meeting to attend next week, technically the day before my sabbatical ends (I’m too good a department citizen to be a stickler about that…), which I have to prepare for by beginning my review of one of the tenure and promotion cases I’ll be involved in over the next few months. But teaching is always the part of my job that I puzzle over the most–as testified to by the amount of time I spend fretting over things like reading lists for the mystery and detective fiction class. With that issue settled for this round, it’s time to turn my attention to my courses in 19th-century fiction. For these, it’s not so much the reading lists that are difficult to decide on: though I do mix them up regularly, the courses are meant to offer something like a ‘greatest hits’ list, and once the most obvious choices are covered, there’s not a lot of room to play around. No, for these classes it’s the assignment sequences that I worry about, partly because I do assign a lot of reading and it’s hard for me to decide how much writing it is reasonable to ask the students to do, particularly as the writing won’t be very good if they have barely had time to finish the novel(s) they are writing about.

I used to do what I think is a pretty standard sequence of one short (3-5 page) paper and one longer (5-7 page) paper, followed by a final short-answer and essay exam. I’ve also done two short papers and then an option of a long paper or an exam. Usually I don’t ask them to do research, or else the research component is deliberately very small–again, I ask them to do a lot of reading and it’s hard enough, IMHO, to come to grips with the complexities of the novels without adding in secondary readings you aren’t really in a position to evaluate if your understanding of the novels is still very preliminary. Even though I usually try to make the essay topics fairly flexible, on the theory that people write best on topics they are genuinely interested in, a lot of the writing always turns out to be quite clearly perfunctory or just plain careless. Some years ago, I read about an assignment that required students to send each other letters early in their work on a novel and then answer them when they were finished–the idea was that students would pick out something that caught their interest and their partner would follow through and explain its significance later on. Not only does this allow the students to find their own angle on the reading, but it makes the audience for their writing clearer and sets them up as a community working together to build their understanding of a range of critical cruxes and problems. I really like the assumptions and expectations of this process, and I developed a version of it for the 19th-century novel classes that ran, I think, quite successfully for a few years. We do a sample letter first, with everyone answering one of a handful of sample questions set by me. Students bring anonymous copies of these first letters to class and we circulate them and discuss them in small groups and then as a whole class, identifying particularly successful strategies as well, of course, as problems–and not just with the letters, but with my sample questions as well. Then over the next three novels they do a letter exchange for each one, each time with a different partner. For the final novel, they have the option of writing a longer, more conventional critical essay with a research component or writing the final exam, which includes answering a question from me about the novel.

I am strongly tempted to do this letter exchange sequence again for both of the 19th-century fiction courses in 2011-12. Because they generate their own topics and write to each other, and because I encourage them to raise issues from their questions in class and to draw on lectures and discussions as they think their way to their responses, it can really raise the overall level of engagement. It also means they are thinking creatively and critically about every novel but often along somewhat unpredictable lines (you can’t predict what their partners will ask about!), and it gets me, too, out of some of the ruts it’s easy to fall into with novels you think you have figured out. The letters are required to be very short (two pages), so they also have to work on focusing what may be a kind of wide-open question and on not wasting words as they answer it. Though I emphasize that a good answer has to be pointed (in other words, they do still need to have a thesis), the letter format prompts (and I encourage) a somewhat more colloquial, personal tone, too. One reason student writing can be so wooden or awkward is that they try to write the way they imagine we do, or they imagine we want them to, and in the process not only do they lose any confidence in their own voice but they end up with tortured constructions and using a vocabulary they are not comfortable with, just to try to sound ‘academic.’ A lot of them relax and become much clearer and more articulate when they have met face to face with their partner (as I insist they do) and then write knowing their job is to tell this particular person something about a topic they care about. (They are still expected to follow standard rules of spelling and grammar!) I have seen some great results.

But…having said all that, I am also reluctant to do this assignment sequence again. The last couple of times I’ve done it, it has been logistically extremely difficult, for one thing. For whatever reason, a lot more students created problems by not submitting their questions to their partners on time, leaving the other student stranded without an essay topic. In response, I made the rules more and more explicit and worked out contingency plans and penalties and so on–but handling these complications becomes very time-consuming, and chasing people with threats and recriminations about their not meeting their part of the bargain is unpleasant. With forty students involved, there are lots of ways things can screw up technically–students send each other attachments that don’t work, or they don’t use the Blackboard tools that make sure the addresses at least are consistent and reliable, or they ignore instructions about document format and end up with incompatibility issues. They miss required face-to-face sessions. They skip the practice letter (which is not worth a lot of marks but, as I stress, is worth a great deal in terms of preparing them for success in the ‘real’ assignments). They misunderstand the requirements–so that my explanations have gotten longer and longer, tediously so. They want lots of specific guidance on how informal or how specific or how many quotations … the first few times I did these assignments, everyone seemed much more confident about working within the general guidelines, but I’ve felt more and more pressure to try to spell everything out (the tyranny of the rubric!) and to anticipate every quirk or . There have always been some whose questions were terribly disappointing (showing clearly, for instance, that the student had read at most the back cover of the book)–again, my explanations of the requirements have gotten longer, and I give more and more examples and discuss good and bad strategies for formulating productive questions, but the last couple of times there just seemed to be an awful lot of students stuck with unusable questions, and even if the provision is there to mark down the students who provided them, I’m still stuck rescuing their partners. In brief (too late for that, I know!), instead of making the writing (and marking) more fun, in many ways the letter exchanges seemed to make everything more stressful. I still saw some excellent, original, smart work, but the students who accomplished it would have done as well on more conventional assignments, I expect, and the overall hassle would have been less.

So I’m not sure what to do. My goals are: to have the students write regularly, preferably at least once about every novel–though not necessarily in equal detail each time, and exam answers would count; to have the students see their writing assignments as closely connected to our work together in the classroom (too often it seems as if papers turn students’ attention elsewhere, as if they don’t realize that they can and should use lectures and discussions to develop their ideas and as models for the kinds of argumentation and evidence appropriate to the assignment); to have students see each other, not just me, as a resource and as participants in the work of learning; to avoid as much as possible writing that is done only because they had to do it–to have the students feel ‘ownership’ (ugh, I know, but it does matter) of their intellectual work, to feel that it really matters to them somehow; and to do all this within reasonable limits, so that they can give real, sustained attention to their assignments and I can evaluate them with clear eyes and a full heart (!) rather than frustration and annoyance at hasty, thoughtless work. Some combination of informal and formal writing seems optimum (in another recent version of these classes, for instance, we did regular ‘free writing’ in class, which cumulatively was worth about 10% of their grade and was meant to jump-start discussion as well as provide seed material for longer assignments). I like giving an option of a final paper or the final exam–which really helps reduce the ‘writing because I have to but can’t give it my full attention’ problem that arises for so many students at the end of term. Students who choose a final paper are likely to be quite highly motivated for it.

There are students out there, I know. What kinds of assignment sequences do you like? What is the best way, in your own experience, for you to keep your attention on the class readings? What kind of writing gives you the most satisfaction? If any of you happen to have been in one of the classes with the letter exchanges, any thoughts or suggestions about their success? And for the other teachers out there, any suggestions? Resources that have helped you?  I got the letter assignment from Art Young’s book on teaching writing across the curriculum (PDF here–see p. 26 and following).  I attended a workshop once on teaching writing where the main ‘lesson’ was ‘don’t assign any writing you don’t want to read when they turn it in’–that always seemed like easier advice to give than to take! But maybe there’s a way to do that, if I could just figure it out.

Youthful Obsessions: Ricardian Edition

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve begun an essay project that involves, among other things, looking back at some of my old Ricardian novels. I wrote another post about them once before, mostly wondering what they would be like to revisit after all these years (more years, now, since it has been nearly three years already since that post–egad!). So far, in addition to reading around in a fair number of relevant non-fiction works, I’ve also reread The Daughter of Time and Marian Palmer’s The White Boar, and now I’m about half way through Rhoda Edwards’s The Broken Sword (which was published as Some Touch of Pity in the UK).  I admit, I was braced for the worst, but really, neither of these old favourites strikes me as embarrassing (unlike Gone with the Wind). Both resolutely avoid any of that annoying “Olde Englishe” stuff that inevitably makes historical fiction seem less, rather than more, authentic–there are traces of faux-medieval idiom in The White Boar, though only in the dialogue, but in general both books are written in very straightforward, literate prose. The characterization in The White Boar is particularly good, with Richard himself important primarily insofar as he inspires the loyalty of the co-protagonists. Neither novel has any strong historical theory behind it (I find this is true of almost all mainstream [if that’s the right word] historical fiction–it’s the rare novelist, like, say, A. S. Byatt or Hilary Mantel, who conjures up a past age as part of a novel of ideas) but both tell a good human story. Both also (like all the others, as I recall) have to touch on key moments that are part of the scanty and very problematic historical record of this period. One of the more interesting things about all this is to watch the novelists work to devise a narrative that makes sense of, say, the various surviving documents, as well as the episodes such as Hastings’s precipitous execution or Richard’s claiming of the crown for himself. Precisely because the record is not complete, there’s lots of room for creative elaboration, and even where the facts are quite specifically known, actions are not self-explanatory–and here, at the level of motive and character, is where the novelists all go to work.

Naturally, I’m rereading these novels with that line about “women writers, for whom the rehabilitation of the reputation of a long-dead king holds a strange and unexplained fascination” echoing in my head: the original sentence is from Charles Ross’s biography, which appears to be the ‘standard’ one at this point, but I’ve found it quoted twice already by other (male) historians–once, oddly, without attribution. I expect to have a thing or two to say about that ‘inexplicable fascination’ in my essay. From a strictly personal point of view, of course, there’s nothing inexplicable at all about it to me, as I shared it! I’ve been wondering why, though. I suppose for any adolescent there’s something appealing about taking up a cause and perceiving yourself to be part of some kind of fight against injustice. But historical injustice? That’s pretty nerdy, I know. My trajectory is logical enough, though: I was a bookworm and a history buff, and before I discovered the Ricardian cause I had already thrown myself into the sad story of the wrongfully imprisoned and executed Mary, Queen of Scots–another fixation that is half intellectual, half visceral or sentimental. I had also been preoccupied with Lady Jane Grey, going so far as to write a play (in 4th grade) about her pathetic (and undeserved!) fate. These cases lacked the contentiousness of the debates over Richard’s guilt or innocence, though–and though both Mary and Jane have been the subjects of novels, they don’t come trailing quite the clouds of exculpatory fiction that Richard enjoys (that I’m aware of, anyway). Novels like The White Boar filled me with passionate advocacy, quite taking over my imagination and convincing me beyond any reasonable doubt that this was a man who needed both love and saving. I’ve been thinking that this is the point at which historiography and eroticism meet, and even merge, in pretty much all of the Ricardian novels:  is that (admittedly odd) combination what makes the male historians so uncomfortable, do you suppose? As you can imagine, this is one of the strands I think my essay will explore.

Did you have youthful reading obsessions? Have you kept them up or gone back to them? What do you think drew you to them?

Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

That’s the title of my book. Catchy, isn’t it? But the reason it’s the title of a post here is that I have been revving up another essay project and realizing that many of the same issues I address in the book are going to be central. I’ve been looking back at some of my old historical fiction about Richard III (long story short: read The Daughter of Time in 6th grade, became dedicated Ricardian, joined Richard III Society, did several school projects on the topic, and collected quite an array of Ricardian fiction–which, just by the way, is still a flourishing genre). I didn’t really know what I would find when I went back to this material, which was part of the appeal: as I learned from working on my Gone with the Wind essay, rereading after many years means you bring a lot of different ideas to things. In this case what is immediately standing out for me is how embroiled the materials are in issues of genre, and how much those issues are (as they pretty much always are) gendered. Here’s just one example, from a fairly well respected late 20th-century biography of Richard (by Charles Ross, a real historian, which as you’ll see, is important):

There developed about this time [late 19thC] an unfortunate divide between the specialist and the popular views of Richard, which is almost the same as saying between the amateur and the professional. Markham was the philosophical progenitive ancestor of Richard’s modern defenders. His offspring have included an Oxford professor of English law, a headmaster of Eton, several peers of the realm and a number of historical novelists and writers of detective stories. Apart from some with serous pretensions to be writing history, notably the late Paul Murray Kendall (himself an American professor of English literature), the writers of fiction are the most prominent, among them Philip Lindsay, whose zeal for Richard matched that of Markham himself, Josephine Tey, whose best-selling Daughter of Time (1951) concerning the fate of the princes was described by that fount of historical authority, the Daily Mail, as ‘a serious contribution to historical knowledge,’ Rosemary Hawley Jarman, author of Speak No Treason [it’s actually We Speak No Treason–I have it], and a number of others, nearly all women writers, for whom the rehabilitation of the reputation of a long-dead king holds a strange and unexplained fascination. . .

It’s true that every one of the many Ricardian novels I have is by a woman writer, but the sheer gratuitousness of that line about their “strange and unexplained fascination”with their subject is perversely delightful–it sets my critical faculties humming. I also love the way that dig at the Daily Mail is also a swipe at Tey’s claim to have contributed anything of historiographical significance.

One of the early pro-Richard sources often cited is Caroline Halsted’s 1844 work Richard III as Duke of Gloucester and King of England. Here’s Ross’s comment:

As a child of the Romantic age she wrote in affecting, indeed melting prose. But there was also some whalebone behind the outer garment of sensibility. Her work contains 82 appendices covering 128 pages drawn from record sources, including the important manuscript known as Harleian 433.

Biography Paul Murray Kendall (himself, as Ross notes, a mere English professor) is not particular impressed by this archival work, however:

Though Miss Halsted did some valuable digging in Harleian MS. 433, the registry of King Richard’s grants and writs, and printed a number of the principal entries as well as other important source materials, her work is conceived rather in the vein of the Victorian gift-book, and to this rude age is almost unreadable.

That’s OK. “Miss Halsted” knew she wasn’t really invited to the party anyway, so like so many of her female contemporaries, she set her work apart from that of the “general” historians, deftly turning their research failures into her apologia:

After many and lengthened discussions from writers of acknowledged ability, the boundaries of the historical and the poetical in the received popular version of the history of Richard the Third remains as indefinite as ever. If the author of the present work had imagined that the course pursued by the zealous inquirers to whom she has alluded was that by which the truth might be discovered, she would have deemed her interference to be in the highest degree presumptuous. If the questions in dispute were to be determined, or could possibly be determined, by acute reasoning or profound philosophical inquiry, she would have shrunk from attempting to exhibit powers to the possession of which she is well aware she cannot pretend; but, it appearing to her that mere argument and discussion were unsatisfactory modes of attempting to determine a doubtful question in history, and that the humble seeker of authorities might in a case like this do better service than the most brilliant or philosophical of speculators, she resolved on collecting from every available source all existing authentic notices, however trivial, of the defamed prince and monarch. Many of them were found in MSS., many were gathered from recent publications bearing on the events of this period, … and many were so widely scattered, or were deposited in places so unlikely to afford materials for such a purpose, that it is by no means astonishing that they have occasionally escaped the notice of general historians.

. . . [S]trong in the power of the evidences she has analysed, and in the belief that no prejudice can withstand the truth when fairly and simply displayed, she indulges the hope that, her unwearied research having fortified her with facts, and her own views being supported by those who rank high in literary fame, she may be shielded from the charge either of defective judgment or of presumption in her bold undertaking.

As I observed in my earlier work, 19th-century women historians “faced, even more than other nineteenth-century women writers, problems of self-presentation and self-authorization:”

How should they write? What voice should they use? What relationship to their readers should they cultivate? What kinds of stories should they tell? Could they fulfill their obligations as historians without violating expectations of them as women? And what exactly were their obligations as (women) historians anyway?

One of the first enabling strategies I identify is a “rhetoric of differentiation and subordination,” a kind of “don’t bother about little me, I’m just puttering away here in your shadow, not trying to encroach on your territory” attitude–even as, of course, just as Halsted does, they proceed quite merrily to encroach: “These gestures allow the women writers at once to distance themselves from ‘historians’ and to appropriate their authority.” Acknowledging that her work might be seen as presumptious, Halsted preemptively, and surely disingenuously, defends herself while pressing on with her scholarly project just the same.

This is going to be fun.

 

Reality Check: ‘The applicant’s publication record is spotty’

Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

To those of you who are also my  Twitter friends, I apologize: I said I was finished with this issue and moving on, but it turns out it is still going around in my head and needs a bit more sorting out–not because I feel aggrieved (that, I’m basically over), but because I think it is symptomatic in ways that are worth further disucssion.

My immediate situation is this: I was invited to participate in a panel  on ‘knowledge dissemination in Victorian Studies in Canada’ at the upcoming British Association of Victorian Studies conference. Specifically, I was asked to present a paper about my experience as a blogger and how it connects to broader issues about research, writing, and ‘knowledge dissemination.’ I was also invited to propose a workshop for graduate students on academic blogging (or, as I like to think of it, blogging as an academic). Naturally, I think this is all good. For one thing, it is encouraging to find that my blogging seems interesting and significant enough to other academics for them to want to hear more about it. Also, it seems like evidence that this activity of mine, which is not by any conventional definition “scholarship,” can nonetheless open a door for me into an event like this–at least to the organizers, that I have been blogging was a reason to include me in this gathering of scholars, not a strike against me. The panel was duly accepted by the conference organizers, and I spent some substantial time last month putting together the materials required to apply for funding to cover travel expenses and the conference registration (which in this case is quite a substantial sum, as it includes on-campus accommodation as well as a registration fee). Times are hard and budgets are tight, but participation in conferences is a recognized professional activity, the kind of thing we are supposed to do, to share our ideas and learn about other people’s. I do it rarely, because my experience is often disappointing, but BAVS is just the kind of conference that promises to be really worthwhile. Our attendance at international conferences also does a little to raise the profile of our home institutions–though in this particular context, I think it’s worth pointing out that my blog, where my name and institutional affiliation are clearly displayed, also does this. (I think it’s safe to say that many people who read my blog had never heard of Dalhousie University before they came here–though perhaps I underestimate the successes of our PR team in getting the word out. I’d actually be interested to know from readers if I’m right about this.)

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the institution I sort of work for that I don’t regularly name here, the University of King’s College (please don’t ask me to explain the Dal-King’s relationship–nobody can do it–let’s leave it at saying that I’m a member of the “Joint Faculty”) promptly coughed up the money I asked them for. Since they are a small institution and in particularly challenging financial circumstances right now, their commitment to supporting faculty research and conference travel is particularly appreciated. Thanks, King’s! But they have a cap on these grants, and just getting to the UK is very expensive these days, even though it’s a modest 5-hour direct flight from here to Heathrow. Luckily, there’s a special fund available through Dalhousie for international conference travel, specifically intended to help with the likely shortfall between a standard-sized travel grant and the real cost of even a short trip. I applied for a modest additional sum from this fund, to make up the difference between the King’s grant and what I anticipated the whole trip would cost. This application was turned down.

This is perhaps an unnecessarily long preamble, especially since the real point of this post is not to complain about this outcome–or at least, not exactly. I understand that universities do not have enough money to pay for everything, and I’m actually readier than most of my colleagues to point to conference travel as something that ought to be more rare than it is, given the multitude of ways we can communicate with each other for free, or at least for no more than the already budgeted overhead costs for internet access. I myself last attended a conference in 2009. (That doesn’t mean that there is nothing valuable about bringing a community of scholars together, though, and providing the occasion and support for focused and also serendipitous face-to-face engagement.) Given the shortage of funds, I also see that applications have to be ranked and there will be some that aren’t ranked as high as others. I do think the rationale for these decisions should be explicit and transparent,  so that we put in the best applications we can and can realistically assess our chances of success before going to the trouble of applying again. So on getting the bad news that I wasn’t getting any more money from my university towards this trip, I fired off a request for the reviewers’ assessments of the application, and here’s where I got my knickers in a bit of a twist, because the single negative comment in the two otherwise perfectly positive evaluations was, under Quality of Applicant,”The applicant’s publications record is spotty.” Given that neither reviewer objected to my budget or to anything about the conference or to my proposed participation in it (“the conference and the applicant’s contributions seem noteworthy,” remarked the same person), it doesn’t seem far-fetched to conclude that the “spotty” publication record accounts for the relatively low rating assigned the application by Reviewer #2 (of course they are anonymous, though my application wasn’t) and its mediocre overall final rating. Did that perception “cost” me the grant? I’m not sure, since I don’t know precisely where the cut-off point was for the fund/don’t fund decision, but something did, and that’s the only clue I have about what it might have been.

But here’s the thing. Yes, absolutely, my publication record over the last 5 years (which is what they asked about) is “spotty” if by that you mean that I haven’t published a peer-reviewed academic article since 2007. My anthology of Victorian writing on the novel did come out in 2009: I’m not sure where editorial projects rate on the whole academic prestige scale, but I can tell you it was a pretty big undertaking and included a fair amount of original scholarship, particularly of the “reading things from old periodicals and figuring out if they are somehow significant, based on research into secondary materials about Victorian theories of the novel” kind. During that 5-year period, though, I have also published 5 essays and 4 book reviews in Open Letters Monthly. Actually, those are all since October 2009–so in the past 18 months or so, I have been more active as a published writer than during any previous time in my life. Because the application asked us to highlight publications especially relevant to the proposed conference, I listed my essay on Ahdaf Soueif as well as my review of Brenda Maddox’s George Eliot in Love and my pieces on Felix Holt and Vanity Fair (remember, the panel is on ‘knowledge dissemination in Victorian Studies’).  Though the blog is discussed in the description of my paper I submitted for the panel (included in the application file), I did not attempt to declare it a “publication” on the application form, even though it is in fact the writing most relevant to a paper about my experience as an academic blogging in Canada. As a blogger, there’s nothing “spotty” about my record at all: I have posted 2-3 pieces (sometimes more) every week on my blog since 2007, for a grand total of 600 posts (601, counting this one!). Some of them are incidental, some of them are substantial. Some reflect original (if sometimes incomplete) thinking about scholarly problems, many of them address critical and interpretive questions. I think I could make the case that on this occasion, I have every right to identify this material as in an important sense a relevant “publication”–but I didn’t. There’s no place on the form, after all, to justify doing so, and the package overall is pretty clear about the relevance of blogging because that’s what I was invited to the conference to talk about. Maybe I made a tactical error in trying to avoid directly confronting the whole “a blog is just meaningless self-publishing” thing, but you’d think a careful reviewer might have thought a little outside the box provided and seen that in this case, that “spotty” comment was kind of missing the point.

I did, however, present my Open Letters pieces as publications, though I did not put the little asterisks next to them to indicate “peer-reviewed.” I think this is  where the “spotty” comment really comes from, and here’s where I think our reliance on (or our faith in) peer review does a disservice, not just to those of us doing other kinds of publishing, but to the principle that what matters is the quality of the work, not the system that grants it (or doesn’t grant it) an extrinsic stamp of approval. Nobody is going to actually read any publication I list on something like this, starred or not. The task of deciding whether I’m doing good work or not has been outsourced to the readers of academic journals. I’m sure I don’t have to tell an audience of bloggers that there are serious flaws with peer review (see here for lots more about it). There’s no good reason (except efficiency and habit–and I don’t underestimate the weight of these) to assume that the little asterisk means “job well done” while its absence means “not a real contribution to the academic enterprise.” Or, we shouldn’t assume that if we understand “the academic enterprise” a little more broadly than perhaps many people do. Consider the panel topic again: “knowledge dissemination.” That’s an ugly coinage, but basically doesn’t it mean getting the word out about what we know? Who says that the only important thing is getting the word out to other academics? (Indeed, who says that other academics get their information exclusively from academic sources?) In fact, though probably the humanities were not at the forefront of anybody’s mind when worrying about this, there’s been a national discussion in recent years about the importance of communicating scholarly research beyond the traditional frameworks (for example).  My review of Brenda Maddox’s book has been viewed 561 times since it went live. As academic blogger Alex Reid has reported, statistics show that 93% of humanities articles go uncited. That doesn’t mean they aren’t read, but if they were serving the purpose they are supposed to, e.g. furthering academic understanding and debate, their citation rate would surely be close to their viewing rate. I can’t know what the results were of those 561 “hits,” but it seems fair to say I disseminated something there. My essay on Gone with the Wind has been viewed more than 9700 times since it went live, and though you would have to read it to know, it offers an extensive ‘expert’ reading that is enmeshed in my work on fiction and ethics, as well as on historiography: it just presents that expertise in an accessible, jargon-free (well, nearly!) way. The Ahdaf  Soueif essay has been viewed a modest 282 times–but reading it over, I am convinced it makes an original contribution to our understanding of Soueif’s novels, and 282 is not bad if Alex Reid and his respondents are right that the average readership for a humanities article is somewhere between 2 and 7. Why would it be better if I had padded it around with footnotes and laid it to rest in the Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures? Of course, I realize it might have been rejected if I had sent it to the Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures. The whole thing would have been a much slower process, certainly: not just writing the kind of paper that can compete for space in such a publication, but waiting to see how I did. Heck, I waited 5 months for a reply to a preliminary inquiry about submitting it to another journal, one that claims to ‘welcome’ such inquiries and even to recommend them prior to our undergoing the full submission process.  By writing it on my own terms, subjecting it not to academic peer review but to the scarily rigorous review of my co-editors at OLM, and then publishing it there, I seized an important moment and, yes, disseminated my knowledge. The only way in which I think it would be preferable to be in, say, JMEL, would be that an essay there would be found and cited by other scholars working on related topics in a way that probably the Open Letters piece won’t be–it won’t show up in the MLA bibliography, right? That said, any scholar with anything on the go these days will do a range of searches including a web search, so someone writing on Soueif is surely bound to find my essay if they are doing a half-decent job of research.

I can’t help but be aware, though, that to some extent I am rationalizing my own recent choices, the way I have prioritized my time. It has turned out that for me, it is not possible to do everything. One rationale often heard for academic blogging is that it can further a ‘proper’ research and publication agenda. This has happened for me to some extent, especially in the early days of my writing about Soueif and while I was contributing at The Valve, but that’s not really how I have been using my blog for some time. Instead of writing posts about Victorian literature, or Victorian studies, I have been writing about Vera Brittain and Elizabeth Bowen and Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo–and Salley Vickers and Jennifer Egan and Morley  Callaghan and Brian Moore. I have chosen to do this, as I have chosen to write essays and reviews for Open Letters on both Victorian and non-Victorian topics, in the full knowledge that I have only so much time for reading and writing and that these are not the kinds of reading and writing that will serve me best professionally. I know perfectly well that the kind of writing I’ve been doing doesn’t “count”;  I feel guilty and inadequate and defensive about not having been equally productive at the kind that does, and I can hardly pretend to be surprised that there are consequences to this.I have thought often about how my decision to use the security of tenure to experiment with the parameters of my work as a critic will affect my chances of any further promotion: it’s ‘research and publications’ (that is, research that leads to academic peer-reviewed publications) that will count for that, no matter how enriched my teaching is as a result of my other intellectual explorations, or how good and even well-respected my non-academic essays might become.

A couple of my “tweeps” have kindly suggested that it’s not easy being “in the vanguard” or being an innovator in a system that is as rule-bound as academia (I’m extrapolating a bit from their 140-character replies to my venting!). I think that without making exaggerated claims for the value of the writing I’ve been doing, it’s safe to see the reviewer’s response to my profile as symptomatic of something like this. The categories and labels in use are no longer sufficient; the boxes we are given to fill in do not fit what all of us are doing; the patterns we are expected to follow need to be altered. A productive, respected (if I may?) blogger presenting a paper on blogging at a panel on knowledge dissemination should not need a string of unrelated peer-reviewed publications to prove herself.

And that really is my  last word on this incident! (Well, except for any responses I might have to comments. And any follow-up tweets …. )

Reading Around: Spinoza, Dickens, and … Ruxton?

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

Apparently Spinoza’s philosophical “stock” is rising:

Another scientist who was passionately Spinozist (going so far as to write him a gushing poem) was Albert Einstein. In Spinoza’s conception of nature, he recognised intuitions matching his own, concerning the elusive unified field theory. Einstein also relied on Spinoza to get him out of trouble when queried by a rabbi as to whether or not he believed in God, averring that he believed in “Spinoza’s God.”

This introduces yet another reason to consider shares in Spinoza: the heightened public interest in the raucous debates between science and religion. Spinoza’s identification of God with nature, though as subtle as that Lord whom Einstein once invoked, makes an invaluable contribution to this issue—precisely because it’s subtle. As does his attempt to establish morality on the purely secular grounds of the scientific study of human nature.

Any other tips? The rising value of Spinozas indicates that postmodernism, which plays fast and loose with rationality, might be heading for a bear market. I’d advise short-selling Heideggers.

This is good news for  my Ph.D. student writing on George Eliot and philosophy, who, on hearing the news, observed that she has been betting on Spinoza for years and is looking forward to the pay-off in the new “post-post-modern world.”

Colleen at Bookphilia has been reading and writing about Martin Chuzzlewit, one of the array of Dickens novels I have yet to read. In her final post she comes at the novel by way of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky

But, Dickens, what are you doing!? You set Tom up as the novel’s moral centre and align him as closely as possible with a literary mode of living and literary typology, but then destabilize such associations via Tom’s declaration that “There is a higher justice than poetical justice” (see previous post). But then, Chaz, you make the novel’s conclusion as literary and meta-literary as can be, not only by revealing old Martin to have been actively attempting to author the paths and outcomes of almost every other character’s actions, but also by making it very difficult for readers familiar with Measure for Measure to not make comparisons between the novel and the play. Given how frequently, in every novel of his I’ve read, Dickens references Shakespeare either directly or obliquely, I can’t believe that 1) Dickens didn’t know precisely what he was doing with Martin Chuzzlewit, and 2) that he trusted his contemporary audience to be as familiar with the Bard as he was. (I had considered offering to write a book on Shakespeare and Dickens but, alas, it’s already been done. Of course it has.) . . .

Martin Chuzzlewit seems to be a novel about the fiction we all indulge in about being able to completely control our own lives, as well as the lives of others when we see fit – when, in the long run, it’s in the hands of something higher that necessarily remains mysterious. That Dickens is careful not to spend much time implying that this higher thing is God (for godliness in his novels seems always to manifest only through one’s actions on earth, especially in The Old Curiosity Shop, but here as well) suggests to me a strangely quiet and gently resigned existential angst. Having read a number of Dickens novels in the past couple of years, and having noticed how much Shakespearean Comedy seems to influence him, I’m pleased to note that overall, even as he pays homage to the Bard, Dickens never completely succumbs to the very tidy conclusions the form allows. The discomfort Shakespeare reveals in the Duke’s surveillance and absolute control is redistributed into something more human and humane in Dickens – the discomfort that comes with acknowledging the essential incompleteness of all happy endings.

I am properly humbled: Colleen, you see, is ‘by training’ an Early Modernist, and here she’s not only reading more Victorian literature than I am (I haven’t read a 19th-century novel in nearly 6 months, unless you count La Vendee, which I am reluctant to) but rocking it completely. But I have begun Our Mutual Friend, so I may make up some ground eventually.

And speaking of 19th-century novels, Amateur Reader has a new favorite–well, as he qualifies himself, “a favorite in a quite narrow sense”:

Life in the Far West is a postmodern* Western first published as a serial in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1848.  The novel describes the life of an American fur trapper La Bonté, his partner Killbuck, and a number of other real and unreal mountain men and Western adventurers.  Ruxton, himself an English mountain man with literary pretensions, in a classic postmodern gesture declared that the book was “no fiction,” italics his, I guess, which is correct if I add one little amending phrase, “except for the parts that are fictional.” . . .

What is a current equivalent to Blackwood’s Magazine?  The New Yorker, perhaps.  I don’t want to say that everyone read Ruxton, but that would not be so far from the truth.  Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and so on would all have at least looked at Ruxton’s pieces, and the subject matter is so exotic and interesting that I do not doubt many of these writers read some or all Ruxton.   I find this amusing.

You would!

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts: Friday Night Lights

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We finished watching the final season of Friday Night Lights last night. I’m surprised how bereft I feel with no more to watch! Though this is not TV with the intellectual reach of The Wire or Deadwood, it has the most heart of any TV show I can think of. I think what moved me most about its conception is that its characters are all striving to be or do better, often against considerable odds. Though they are flawed (except, arguably, for Coach Taylor), and they often fail to turn their good intentions into right actions (I’m talking about you, Tim Riggins), there is something tremendously affecting about watching them muddle through. And even when their triumphs were a little too pat (the East Dillon Lions, for instance, are surely unbelievably successful in their second-ever season), I was thrilled at every one–and I was also usually in the grips of heart-pounding anxiety until I knew how things were going to work out. It’s just great human drama, and the writers and actors (and their whole team) completely succeeded in making me care about the characters and feel “invested” (a word that recurs frequently in the DVD extras) in their decisions. The only time I felt skeptical was during the unfortunately melodramatic “murder” plot involving Landry and Tyra in Season 2. The writers were right to let that lapse out of the show’s memory, just as they were right to keep some other early elements going–a particularly nice small touch, I thought, was bringing Landry and Matt back together in the final episode for a little of the dry, friendly banter that they open the series with as Matt practices throwing the football through the old tire in his unprepossessing yard never dreaming of the immanent tragedy that will propel him into the role of QB1. They didn’t do too well with the “Julie Goes to College” plot-line (why is it that TV shows often falter so badly when they try to portray university life? a professor who holds salons, for crying out loud? and a TA who gives her paper a C- because he thinks it’s “safe” and she’s bright enough to do better–when he’s talked to her, what, twice?), but by that time I was so involved with Vince that I would have forgiven the show anything.

It’s Coach Taylor who carries the show, though, and who embodies individually the qualities the show stands up for overall: integrity, sincerity, perseverance, commitment, loyalty, aspiration. His official job is to win football games, but the series ultimately focuses on his role in building character. I had reservations occasionally about the degree of shouting involved in this: I’m always dubious that people who are yelled at will in fact be motivated to do their best. (Those of you with more experience at–and tolerance for–organized team sports can perhaps tell me if this is indeed how coaches work, and whether it is considered somehow necessary or beneficial to the players to encounter authority in this fairly absolute way.) What saved it for me was how clear it was that Coach really did have the best interests of his players at heart, and that in addition to yelling at them, he also opened his door to them at all hours of the day and night and stood up for them in every context where he could make a difference. When they screwed up, he made no secret of his displeasure but also showed them that he absolutely believed they could do better. The only one he never won over was J. D., who turned into a real little creep in Season 4–though by that time his equally creepy dad had cost Coach Taylor his job with the Panthers anyway. If he’d stayed with Coach, I’m sure he’d have turned out just fine! I think Kyle Chandler is amazing in the role: in addition to having perfect piercing eyes (he can command a scene just by looking at someone), he’s completely believable, especially during the football scenes. There’s one win in particular (I won’t specify which, so in case you haven’t watched it yet, you too can be on the edge of your seat until the final minute–which in FNL is always when a game is decided!) after which his reaction is so tangibly fired up I thought our TV might have switched to 3-D.

I don’t even like football in my real life, but watching FNL gave me new interest in and respect for the game. I think Sonya Chung is right (in her nice essay on the show at The Millions) to emphasize “the way the football action itself is used to advance plot” in the series:

You almost always know what’s going to happen during a given game: some player is going to succeed or fail, according to the character’s dramatic journey.  And yet it’s almost ridiculous how gripping it is to watch it unfold – Matt Saracen throwing interceptions and losing his QB1 spot to an upstart prick freshman in Season Three; running back Luke Cafferty (Matt Lauria) getting side-tackled hard while playing with a serious hip injury he’s kept secret throughout Season Four; geek-turned-kicker Landry Clark (Jesse Plemons) going for a 45-yard field goal in the final seconds of the final game of the season.  All of Season Four is built around an underdog uphill climb for the ragtag East Dillon Lions (with Coach Taylor at the helm, now the victim of aforementioned prick freshman’s prick father’s maneuverings to get him transferred after a local gerrymandering debacle), and of course we know where it’s going: there’s nowhere to go but up.  Still, the battle is replete with the absorbing defeats and triumphs of both game and life.  Season Four is also where we see a more explicit emergence of racial issues (featuring The Wire’s Michael B. Jordan as the East Dillon quarterback), handled like everything else on the show – as part of the fabric of everyday life.

Beyond that, even, I’d say football is really the occasion, rather than the reason, for the characters’ development, standing in for any endeavor that relies on the kind of commitment, cooperation, and hunger for success that football does here. In a different setting, it could be a youth orchestra, a ballet company, a hockey team, couldn’t it? And yet I guess it’s true that football has a specific resonance all its own in some communities, and it’s also more exciting (I suppose) to watch football practice than an orchestra rehearsal!

There are so many other things I enjoyed about the show, including the increasing complexity in the relationship between Eric and Tami Taylor, culminating in the difficult choices that end Season 5. Tami’s a great character in her own right, also brilliantly and believably played, and the story-lines related to her work as counselor and principal effectively round out our picture of the Dillon community. The style of the show was fascinating, from the loose camera work to the unscripted freedom you can sense in so many of the scenes–the producers’ openness to experiments and improvisation is one of the reasons the show seems so real and authentic, presumably. It’s the people that really mattered, though, and the way the show embraced the emotional possibilities of their lives.  I was so happy every time a door opened to reveal Matt Saracen–or, for that matter, when we got to visit his grandmother, one of the best “minor” characters in the show. It was nice to see Jason Street reappear too. The people seem so real that I kept wondering what had become of “Smash” Williams (we do finally get a glimpse of him–on TV). But I got fond of Luke and Becks too, along with Vince and Tinker and especially Jess Merriweather. I’m going to miss them all! To quote from Chung’s essay again, Friday Night Lights is “an unflinching portrait of contemporary America that is not at all clever or ironic; that is both earnest and real; that dares you to care, and to embrace the notion that heart and personal morality are at the center of everything we do.” The lack of irony, the earnestness, might strike some viewers as faults, symptoms a kind of deliberate, even self-indulgent, naivete, but to me it was a relief and a pleasure  to watch a show that served up some idealism without ignoring realism.

I’m wondering if I could develop a pedagogical style based on Coach Taylor. Do you think if I opened every lecture by saying “Let’s go have some fun!” and then yelled “What are you doing??” every time someone fumbled a question, things would go better than usual? We could do worse than to adopt “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts” as our mantra…

Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul

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I finished Barbara Reynold’s biography of Dorothy Sayers this evening feeling as if I know a lot more about both Sayers’s life and her personality. I already knew a little bit of the biographical outline–Somerville, a child “out of wedlock,” a turn to religious writing, translations of Dante–but because in my life she has always mattered because of her Peter Wimsey novels, I never really focused on anything else about her. I knew (and know better now) that she would not have wanted it that way, and yet that even in her lifetime she had to live with the frustration of other people’s preoccupation with her famous detective. She wrote to a friend that one reason she didn’t write more Wimsey novels was precisely that people kept importuning her to do it: “I have been so much put off by being badgered to do it when I was wrapped up in other things that the mere thought now gives me a kind of nausea. . . . the thought of being pushed and halloooed into the old routine fills me with distaste.” Fair enough–but except for now feeling I really ought to, and would actually quite like to, read Dante in her translation (confession: I haven’t read Dante in any translation so far), I’m still with those badgerers and halloooers.

I think one reason I can’t move forward with her is that I don’t share her religious convictions and so I can’t really enter into the mental world or the enthusiasms of her later career. In some ways Sayers is a more easily likeable person than Vera Brittain, or even than Winifred Holtby–it turns out she was rather a bon vivante, much more playful and frisky than the other two, and more tough and racy as well. But their passionate sincerity and dedication to social and political causes are easier for me to care about than Sayers’s radio plays about the life of Christ. It’s clear from the material Reynolds includes, though, that Sayers embraces a kind of practical or tough-minded Christianity, and also that she does see it as important to integrate religious with political thought and action. In one of her letters, she emphasizes that her faith is not instinctive or (she thought) irrational:

Since I cannot come through God through intuition, or through my emotions, or through my ‘inner light’ (except in the unendearing form of judgment and conviction of sin) there is only the intellect left. And that is a very different matter. . . Where the intellect is dominant it becomes the channel of all the other feelings. The ‘passionate intellect’ is really passionate. It is the only point at which ecstasy can enter. I do not know whether we can be saved by the intellect, but I do know that I can be saved by nothing else.

Reynolds goes on to say that Sayers found this “combination of intellectual light and spiritual ardour” in Dante; I would add that it seems the right way also to describe the love of Harriet and Peter, not just in the resolution of Gaudy Night but in the ecstatic passages of Busman’s Honeymoon–which I was glad Reynolds did not apologize for, as many have:

The love-scenes in Busman’s Honeymoon are exultant. The surprising, and original, thing about them, for a novel, is that they are love-scenes between a husband and a wife. Despite the deterioration of her own marriage, Dorothy L. Sayers the writer has allowed herself to visualize Hymen as a god of joy. Romantic sentiment, which she had so long distrusted, here comes triumphantly into its own.

I always thought so too.

One last quotation I liked, this time not from Sayers but about Sayers, from a letter from Professor R. D. Waller of the University of Manchester thanking Sayers for her lecture there on Dante. It had “heart,” he said, explaining further

that it was about something humanly interesting and that you were humanly interested in it . . . I don’t see why professors and lecturers shouldn’t try to give lectures like yours and so put a bit of heart into their universities . . . I think you do a good thing giving lectures like that when you can in universities . . . University people have grown shy of committing themselves to anything, especially in the presence of their colleagues, for fear of being proved wrong, or perhaps of being thought naïve for having any beliefs or enthusiasms.