Author: Rohan Maitzen

This Week (and Last) in My Classes (March 24, 2009)

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In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we have been working on examples of the police procedural, including short stories by Ed McBain, Peter Robinson, and Ian Rankin. Now we are nearly done with our discussion of Rankin’s Knots and Crosses. I initially chose this novel for this course because I admire the quality of Rankin’s writing and have generally gone with the first in a series, to avoid the sense that I need to fill in a lot of back story on the detective’s development. I have kept it on the list because I enjoy its self-conscious literary and gothic elements and the way it doesn’t really fit the conventions of the procedural. It also deals with themes about masculinity, brotherhood (especially as nurtured–or forced–through the army and the police force), and uneasy relationships between male sexuality and violence. In these ways I feel it provides a good complement to, say, Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi (though in a very different register)–which also explores sex and violence but as linked through conventional romantic fantasies, and considered from the perspective of a female protagonist struggling to reconcile her own sexual desires with her autonomy. Knots and Crosses is also short (Rankin’s books get both better and much, much longer) and neatly structured (almost too neatly, I now think). In other words, it’s a pretty good teaching text. This year, though, I find I’m a bit tired of it. It’s creepy, for one thing (students have remarked this in past years as well), and there are signs in it of Rankin’s relative inexperience as a novelist (for instance, what I consider problems in his handling of point of view, such as shifting occasionally to the perspective of the serial killer or of one of his victims–this kind of thing can be done well, but here seems primarily aimed at increasing suspense, which I find manipulative if it doesn’t also serve some larger idea or balance). Especially since I think I’m going to concede the argument against An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (routinely an unpopular text, though one of the few books on the reading list that I like just as a book to read), I may consider either a longer P. D. James or a longer Rankin to represent the procedural. I’m tempted by Fleshmarket Close, but then a 400+ pager near the end of term might sink my evaluations altogether….

In Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt last week it was a small sampling of Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne, and Christina Rossetti. CR is the author of a couple of my favourite poems, including this one:

Echo

Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope and love of finished years.

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter-sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brim-full of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death;
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.

It’s the sound and feeling of the words here that I respond to here, as much as, or more than, anything the poem is specifically saying. For the class, we read a selection of her religious poetry (I know, one way or another it can all be read as religious)–“Up-Hill,” “A Better Resurrection,” “The Three Enemies,” and a couple of others, and then “Goblin Market,” always fun to read and provoking to interpret. For today and Wednesday it’s Hopkins (faith today, with “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” and “Pied Beauty,” and doubt next time, with some of the ‘terrible’ sonnets). So a lot of our discussions over the past few classes have turned on relationships between aesthetic and sensual responses to the world and spiritual ideas and feelings.

Weak Reading; or, That’s Not What It’s About

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A while back Dan Green posted a link to this interesting exchange between Derek Attridge and Henry Staten. I’m attracted by the idea of “weak” or “minimal” reading they discuss, because it seems related to my own reservations about some tendencies of academic literary criticism. Here’s an excerpt from Attridge’s introduction:

I’ve been trying for a while to articulate an understanding of the literary critic’s task which rests on a notion of responsibility, derived in large part from Derrida and Levinas, or, more accurately, Derrida’s recasting of Levinas’s thought, one aspect of which is an emphasis on the importance of what I’ve called variously a “literal” or “weak” reading. That is to say, I’ve become increasingly troubled by the effects of the enormous power inherent in the techniques of literary criticism at our disposal today, including techniques of formal analysis, ideology critique, allusion hunting, genetic tracing, historical contextualization, and biographical research. . . .

The notion that it is smarter to read “against the grain” rather than to do what one can to respond accurately and affirmatively to the singularity of the work can compound this disregard of what is truly important. This is not to say that the use of literary works as illustrations of historical conditions or ideological formations (including abhorrent ones) is invalid or reprehensible; just that to do so is not to treat the works in question as literature. . . .

I’m not (yet) familiar with the other work in which Attridge develops this notion of critical responsibility or the value (or even obligation) of responding “accurately and affirmatively to the singularity of the work.” But so far it sounds as if his work would help me articulate my own dissatisfaction with the often sizable gap between what literary texts themselves are primarily concerned with–the conversation they are consciously having with their readers–and what we talk about when we talk about them in our criticism. (I discuss this concern briefly, and a bit flippantly, here in the context of a classic deconstructive reading of Middlemarch, and here in a discussion of Denis Donoghue’s The Practice of Reading, to give a couple of examples, and I’ve pointed to James Wood and Edward Dowden as critics who can [though, in Wood’s case, may not always] exemplify what it means to focus on what is “truly important” by the standards of the text itself.) At stake, I think, is the issue a friend with a library science background has told me is called in his world, perhaps unofficially, “aboutness.” In determining the appropriate way to catalogue a book, a decision must be made (note the bureaucratic passive voice) regarding its central identity or “aboutness”: where it belongs depends on what is it ultimately about. Another useful concept might be what Henry James called the author’s “donnee,” or Donoghue simply calls the text’s “theme”–though Donoghue emphasizes that at issue is the text’s theme, not the critic’s (he protests, regarding recent criticism of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” that “Yeats is not allowed to have his theme: he must be writing about something else”). Often, when hearing or reading examples of recent critical analysis, I find myself thinking, “very clever, but that’s not what the book is about!”* So at least initially, I like the idea of rigorously minimal reading.

But a ‘weak reading’ movement would run into trouble pretty quickly, because a text’s own “theme” is rarely obvious–which is the challenge Attridge and Staten confront in the bulk of their discussion. They attempt a ‘minimal’ reading of Blake’s “The Sick Rose”; Attridge proposes “talking about what [they] take to be obvious (as well as what a concern with the obvious makes possible and perhaps what it excludes),” to which Staten adds the clarification (or qualification) that “if something is obvious, then it must be so not just to me but to others as well, if not initially, then with a bit of pointing out.” But, as every English professor knows, the devil is in the details: what’s obvious is very much a result of one’s experience and preparation. Attridge and Staten seem to have put themselves at a disadvantage in this experiment by starting with a poem that is, as Staten says, “a very un-obvious poem.” Really, the only obvious thing about it to me is precisely its overt reaching at symbolic resonance. The moves in their attempt to fix some stably obvious points certainly demonstrate that weak reading requires considerable effort:

DA: Now you may say that to read the rose as a symbol of beauty, perfection, etc. is to leave the surface, and the garden plant, and therefore the realm of the obvious, to enter the depths about which there cannot be general agreement.

HS: Yes.

DA: But don’t these connotations constitute an aspect of the generally agreed meaning of the word rose? Or perhaps we need to distinguish between the obvious and the more recherché aspects of the word’s symbolic force. Of the associations I mentioned, beauty, perfection and love are surely not much less general than the literal botanical meaning.HS: There are many associations that a word like “rose” can potentially arouse; but which of these associations are in fact activated within a specific poem, in a way that we actually need to bring out in order to get the bold, sharp outlines of the poem’s action? Perfection doesn’t seem to me to play a significant role in the major dynamic of “The Sick Rose”—a dynamic you’ve described so well—and therefore I would say this meaning is not saliently activated here (certainly not at the level of what is or can become obvious). The rose is sick, and sickness doesn’t attack perfection as such, it attacks health. Beauty is no doubt there in some way, since flowers in general have this connotation; but even beauty plays no direct role in the drama of the poem; “bed of crimson joy” suggests a kind of exuberant organic vitality in the rose more than it does its beauty. The drama foregrounds the joyous vitality of the rose, on the one hand, and its vulnerability to the worm, on the other hand; and in this connection the associative resonance would be, rather, with the softness of rose petals, so easily crushed, don’t you think? I don’t claim that this association is obvious; it’s a bit in the background. But it’s more directly linked to the manifest action of the poem than are beauty or perfection.

I wonder if their work would have been easier or harder if they had chosen a more literal example for their case study.

*One phenomenon with which anyone in literary studies is certainly familiar, for instance, is the interpretive strategy by which something seemingly incidental in the text is seized upon and ‘discovered’ to have great interpretive significance–usually because it can be read symptomatically, helping turn the text, as Attridge says, into an “illustration[] of historical conditions or ideological formations.”Here’s a mildly parodic (but fairly accurate) example of how it works. Suppose the text is a 19th-century realist novel–say, Barchester Towers, which I happen to be reading now. Imagine there’s a scene with a dinner party at which pickles are served. Now, the immediate action of Barchester Towers has everything to do with the internecine rivalries of English clergyman and the moral and social crises flowing from them, and nothing to do with pickles, but now that we have noticed the pickles, it becomes irresistible to follow up on them. Lo and behold, nobody has done pickles yet (though I could give you quite a list of what has been done). So we produce a pickled reading. What are the cultural implications of pickles? Who could afford them, and who could not? Were pickling techniques perhaps learned abroad, maybe in the chutney-producing regions of the eastern empire? Or maybe pickling was once a cottage industry and has now been industrialized. We learn all about these issues and make that jar on the table resonate with all the socio-economic and cultural meanings we have uncovered. Though the pickles seemed so incidental, now we realize how much work they are doing, sitting there on the table. (Who among us has not heard or read or written umpteen versions of this paper?) And perhaps we are right to bring this out–after all, for whatever known or felt reason, Trollope saw fit to put pickles there and not, say, oysters or potatoes. But do we really understand more about Barchester Towers, or just more about pickles–not in themselves, but as symptoms of industrialism, colonialism, or bourgeois taste in condiments? It’s not that our pickle paper might not be interesting or, indeed, accurate in all the conclusions it draws about the symptomatic or semiotic or other significance of the pickles. But it’s hard not to feel somehow that such an analysis misses the point of the book and thus has a certain intrinsic irrelevance.

This Week in My Classes (March 10, 2009)

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In Mystery and Detective Fiction, it’s time for ‘A’ is for Alibi. I have fun with this one, putting as much interpretive pressure on it as I can to test our Reverse Thurber principle (in our very first reading for the course, “The Macbeth Murder Mystery,” he shows it can be comical to read ‘real’ literature as detective fiction, while we turn the tables and read genre fiction as seriously as we would read MacBeth) . Will any of these novels collapse under the pressure? I’m helped a lot in this case by the fun Grafton is having playing with hard-boiled detective conventions as well as gothic and romance. That kind of self-consciousness is a critic’s good friend. I’ve been emphasizing the novel’s chronology, which places the story in the context of changes in gender politics and roles, particularly within marriage: the victim’s first wife marries him in 1957; they are divorced in 1970 (leaving her with bitter memories of her life as a Barbie doll); he is found dead in 1974 and his second wife is accused of the murder. Though she hires Kinsey Millhone to prove her innocence, she too recalls the deceased as controlling. I proposed last class that the poor fellow is doubly victimized, not only as the actual murder victim, but as the scapegoat for patriarchy. How much sympathy, if any, this earns him is another question: Grafton has said she devised the novel as a way to profit from her own revenge fantasies during a painful divorce. Tomorrow we’ll be focusing on the other murder plot, though, which involves the gender-bending “homme fatale” and culminates in Kinsey’s fairly unheroic last stand pant-less in a garbage can.

In Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt, ‘A’ is for Arnold, angst, and alienation. Our progression (as I was trying to explain in a rambling opening comment for the class yesterday) has been from writers wrestling with specific challenges to their faith (or, with Darwin, presenting findings with challenging implications) to writers reimagining society and morality in the absence of that faith (the secular fable of Silas Marner, in which the major value of church-going is that it fosters community and sympathy) or now, with Arnold, seeking in poetry and culture alternative sources of inspiration and spirituality. But while Eliot eases her readers through the transition, in his poetry at least Arnold captures the sense of dislocation and grief that could also be part of the weaning from religion. “Dover Beach,” of course, is the best known of his elegies for lost faith, but “The Buried Life” is also beautifully evocative:

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us–to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.

I like the simplicity with which this poem resolves, as the speaker considers the soothing touch of “a beloved hand” and the “tones of a loved voice” carressing “our world-deafened ear” and the uneasy and irregular lines of pentameter and tetrameter that make up most of the poem soften, restfully, into easy (and rhyming) trimeter (actually, I guess the final line is anapestic):

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

“To Marguerite–Continued,” all built around the conceit of us “mortal millions” as islands isolated by “the sea of life,” but longing to be reunited as “parts of a single continent,” also ends well, with one of my favourite lines of 19th-century poetry, actually:

Who ordered, that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?–
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

If there isn’t already a novel called The Estranging Sea, maybe I should write one.

For show and tell, I can bring in my old New Yorker cartoon (sadly, I can’t find an image of it to post here) that shows a bemused couple watching Old Sideburns on their TV; the caption is, “Here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night, Matthew Arnold, Fox News, Channel Five.”

Sony Reader Update

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As promised, here’s an update on my experience with the Sony Reader. I’ve owned it for about a week now.

Short version: I’m torn.

Long version:

I love my new Sony Reader PRS-700 because:

  • it lets me store, carry, bookmark, highlight, and annotate hundreds of books in one sleek, lightweight package (and believe me, for a Victorianist, the contrast with carrying around the ‘real’ thing is substantial)
  • it also stores easy-to-read versions of Word documents
  • in these ways it makes it possible to have a large percentage of the material I need for my ongoing research (and teaching and just plain reading) handy in any location, while also letting me interact with it in ways that make the electronic device feel a lot like working with paper
  • the touch screen is cool (actually, the whole thing is cool)
  • there aren’t a lot of buttons cluttering up the unit and the page-turn button in particular is conveniently located
  • overall, then, it is a remarkably user-friendly and practical device for someone in my line of work…except,

I hate revised to struggle a bit with my Sony Reader PRS-700 because:

  • the cool touch screen results in glare that makes it difficult to read the books–which is, after all, the primary reason for owning the thing in the first place
  • the display, though impressively crisp, has poor contrast compared to the less expensive PRS-505 model (which also does not have the same problem with glare)

I’m also not fond of the software Sony provides (but there are alternatives, including this one which is Mac-friendly), and all the reviews that say the Reader is no good at handling PDFs are quite right. But I knew these things going in. I also knew that some people had complained about the glare and the contrast, but others had said ‘no problem,’ so the annotation functions seemed likely to outweigh them. But do they? That’s where I’m stuck.

Do I keep this one for its multi-functionality (there’s a nice techno-geeky word), accepting the trade-off of the text not being optimally visible? (Depending on the lighting you’re working in, the LED lights that Sony has added to this model help with the contrast problem, but not with the glare, and as one of the other attractions of the Reader was the e-ink technology which I hoped would not tire my eyes the way back-lit screens do, I’m annoyed at resorting to this. Also, the lights run down the battery faster.)

Or do I trade down for the earlier version, so that I can store, carry, and really read the books, and just keep on taking notes by hand or on my computer? Maybe Sony was right the first time: an e-reader should do that job well, not try to be all things to all people.

I think I have to go back to the Sony store and do some side-by-side comparisons. I’ve read (on my computer, until my eyes were bugging out) all kinds of reviews and comment threads on these and other e-readers, but it does seem to come down to how well it works for your individual eyes and purposes.

Have any of you tried an e-reader? Or do you just read electronic books on your computer? And it’s no use recommending the Kindle (1 or 2) because it’s not available up here.

Further update, in case anyone cares: I did a more sustained reading test last night, reading the final volume of Silas Marner all on the Reader. In the right light, it was no problem at all to read it: what you need is fairly bright diffuse light. As the best location I found was actually in one of my usual favourite reading chairs with a good lamp beside it, that doesn’t seem an insurmountable problem. So, most likely I’ll hang on to this version, though I’m going to try a couple more experiments just to be sure.

This Week in My Classes (March 3, 2009)

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We’re back from reading week, and in true Maritime fashion the second phase (I think of it as the downhill rush) of the term was ushered in with snow, ice pellets, and several hours of freezing rain, meaning an awful lot of students didn’t actually get back. Maybe that will be the last storm of the season. Ha. (Remind me again why the first European settlers in this region didn’t just keep moving on when they realized what they were letting themselves in for? I guess you do have to go pretty far away from here, though, to get to a temperate, never mind a warm, climate.)

In Mystery and Detective Fiction this week, it’s P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, which is one of the few books on the course list that I would actually read just for my own pleasure and interest rather than out of professional obligation. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy many of the other readings, but I consider James a good novelist, not just a significant mystery novelist. Unsuitable Job reminds me of Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories (really, I suppose, it’s the other way aroud)–not in any specifics of the cases, but in the attention to evocative atmosphere and compelling characterization achieved with considerable economy. The lectures I’ve worked up on Unsuitable Job emphasize the continuities James herself identifies between her work and that of the 19th-century realist novel, particularly in terms of the novel’s insistence on the centrality of ethics. Though, as with all mysteries, there is a strong puzzle component here, a problem to be solved (and a grim one at that), I think it is Cordelia’s development that the novel is really about, particularly the way she grows into the strengths she has by virtue of her compassion and strong sense of justice. Detection is pitched (by others) in the novel as an “unsuitable job for a woman” because of the presumably masculine qualities of toughness, objectivity, and rationality it demands, but she shows, first, that a delicate-looking young woman can have those qualities too, and that she can exercise them in the service of “softer” and more conventionally feminine values including empathy and love. James’s usual detective, Adam Dalgleish, is notable also for the strength of his humanity and insight as well as intellect. Insofar as The Maltese Falcon is an indictment of modern society for making survival dependent on refusing to “play the sap,” I find Unsuitable Job a kind of antidote, because Cordelia refuses to abandon those she loves but incorporates justice to her feelings for them as part of her larger quest for what is right. I find her confrontation with Ronald Callender suspenseful less because we know there’s a murderer in the room but because it pits genuinely competing values against each other. By giving one set of them to a particularly repellent murderer, of course James is tipping the scales–but no worse, perhaps, than Dickens does by giving fairly similar values to Mr. Gradgrind.

In my Faith and Doubt seminar, we have moved on (sighs of relief all ’round) to Silas Marner, which is growing on me every time I read it. I so appreciate the rewards of re-reading George Eliot. In this particular case, the novel’s engagement with religion is more interesting to me after several weeks discussing the ways other writers responded to the challenges to their faith in the period. I think she is both sharp and subtle about the ways religion is experienced and understood by people who are caught up, not in abstract theological disputes, but in human needs and desires, such as the need for one’s labour, or suffering, to be (or at least feel) purposeful, and about the intricate ways in which religious practices are as much social and personal as spiritual or devout. We talked a bit yesterday, and I hope will talk more tomorrow, about the contrasts between Lantern Yard and Dolly Winthrop’s version of church-going, for instance. We also had some interesting discussion about the genre of the book, and what seemed perhaps a fruitful (or perhaps just an unresolved) tension between its fabular form–the pressure in it towards standing as a parable, a secularized version of a fall, a casting out from Eden maybe, and then a humanistic redemption–and its realist aesthetic (or George Eliot’s more general commitment to realism). After our work on Darwin before the break, I particularly enjoyed looking at the scenes which on the surface are most contrived and artificial, such as the convergence of Dunstan’s crime and Eppie’s appearance, the replacement of the gold coins with her gold hair, and seeing how these seeming coincidences or acts of what might (because so hard to explain at once) be attributed to divine (or just novelistic) intervention, are given such detailed backstories, so that we are reminded to be cautious about providing preternatural explanations when we are simply too ignorant to account for things naturalistically. Of course, that is one variation on GE’s consistent theme that the good and bad in our lives is attributable to human actions and complicated circumstances.

In other news, I’ve become the proud owner of a Sony Reader, which I requested as part of a grant with an eye to making my research materials more portable and my research overall more ‘sustainable.’ The portability is a huge thing for a Victorianist, I must say. It is dazzling to think that in that small machine, I already have about 20 nicely formatted Victorian novels (I had fun picking my 100 free classics from the Sony ebook store) and soon will have several books central to my Ahdaf Soueif project. No more debating at the end of the day which books to bring home from my office! And this model has an annotation feature that seems quite simple to use. I find reading on computer screens quite tiring, which is what made this seem a better option for a reading-intensive project (and person) than something like a Netbook, which is nearly as portable. I’ll report more on this later on, in case anyone else is brooding about the usefulness of an ebook reader for research or other purposes.

Best Doctor’s Note Ever

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Much of my February “break” time has been spent marking papers. It’s not my favorite part of my job, but it has its good moments. This batch, one bright spot was finding this note attached to a late assignment:

[This student] has been impaired above the neck for the past 2-3 weeks, and this has interfered with her school work.

I’m sure it has.

This Week in My Classes (February 20, 2009)

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Whew. This has been another week in which I have not been able to count on even getting to class. However, despite the best efforts of winter, children with mysterious abdominal pains, a non-responsive iBook (now recovered, thank goodness) and other threats to a well-ordered but precariously balanced life, all of my scheduled class meetings actually went ahead as planned. And next week is Reading Week! In celebration of which I am determined not to do anything specifically work-related this weekend…and tonight I’m going to watch ER (which I was too tired and busy to watch ‘live’ last night) and other suitably diverting things without, for once, feeling guilty about all the things on my “to do” list. (Alright, I confess: I’ve rented “Mamma Mia!” which looks suitably frothy and brainless, plus nostalgic, as once in my foolish youth I was an ABBA fan. Hey, it was the 1970s: lots of people were ABBA fans…and frankly, after tuning in briefly to the Grammy Awards this year, I find myself thinking we could do worse than churn out some songs with catchy tunes, nice harmonies, and lyrics you don’t mind teaching your 7-year-old daughter.) [Update: “Mamma Mia!” is absolutely terrible. Awful. Appalling. The acting is bad. The singing is worse–in fact, I ended up skipping through most of the musical numbers because I couldn’t bear it. I knew the storyline was going to be lame but it was worse than I expected watching it play out. Sigh.]

In Mystery and Detective Fiction we finished with The Maltese Falcon this week. I continue to find it one of the saddest books I know. We had some fun thinking about whether Sam’s line “If they hang you I’ll always remember you” is actually kind of romantic. Although I can still work up some enthusiasm for discussing this novel, I am planning to do The Big Sleep in its place when I teach this class next year. After a while, it’s hard to feel you have anything fresh to say, and there’s a temptation to rely too hard on last year’s notes. I have never even read all of The Big Sleep, so working it up to teaching pitch will be a fun part of next year’s planning.

In Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt, on Wednesday we had our class presentation on Darwin, which concluded with a “test what you’ve learned about Darwin”-type game called (yes, you guessed it) “Natural Selection.” I always enjoy students’ ingenuity. I challenge them to think about how they feel when their classmates present–what strategies keep them engaged, what kind of activities they feel are productive, and so on. Their game questions were open-ended enough that (once we stopped worrying about our team’s extinction, or who would get the prize cupcakes) we had some good general discussion about the impact of Darwin’s ideas on Victorian literature as well as on more contemporary issues. Today we discussed Browning’s “Caliban Upon Setebos.” I was quite anxious coming into class, as things have not been as lively in this seminar as I am used to, and this is not the most accessible of poems. However, we did at least as well today as we have been lately, for which I give Browning all the credit. It’s such a strange, interesting poem that I think at least some of the students were simply drawn in by that, while the dramatic monologue form provides a lot of useful starting points for analysis. Though it is not explicitly a poem about evolution, one aspect of it that we discussed was the way Caliban observes with world in the manner of a naturalist. We were pretty well prepared to consider the ironic revision the poem offers to Paley’s Natural Theology (the poem’s subtitle is “Natural Theology on the Island”), and to compare Caliban’s inferences about the design or purpose of the universe based on his observations to the conclusions our other authors have suggested. All in all, then, I thought it went quite well. Still, I think we’ll all be happy to get to Silas Marner next–after the break!

Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk

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(belatedly x-listed)

By the end of Palace Walk I was enjoying it a lot more than I was at first, and I think that’s because I had learned to let go of some of the expectations I had for the novel–or for novels more generally. Although I knew at an intellectual level how many of my assumptions about the plots and forms of novels must be bound up in very culturally specific literary and other values, much about Palace Walk seemed familiar at first, and I think that sense of familiarity misled me, so that it took a while for me to realize how far from home I had really gone. It’s a “family saga” novel, for instance, the first in Mahfouz’s ‘Cairo Trilogy.’ It’s a novel of urban life; one of the critical blurbs on the back cover proposes that the “alleys, the houses, the palaces and mosques and the people who live among them are evoked as vividly in [Mahfouz’s] work as the streets of London were conjured up by Dickens.” So far, so familiar. It opens as a novel about a young wife immured in her home, waiting (like an angel in the house) for her husband to return from his nightly carousing. As the novel goes on, we learn about Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s nearly tyrannical control of his home and family–his wife Amina rarely leaves the house, certainly not without his permission, and his daughters are never seen by outsiders, observing the street life outside the house from peepholes in their latticed balcony. In the world of the novel, his strictness is unusually conservative, and the license he grants himself (particularly his series of mistresses) raises even within his own consciousness some concern about hypocrisy. Further, early in the novel one of his sons catches glimpses of a neighbour’s daughter and becomes illicitly enamored, while one of his daughters trades glances with a handsome police officer who has spotted her one day dusting the curtains. Both matches are forbidden by the head of the family.

OK: a tyrannical patriarch hypocritically indulging himself while opposing young love–don’t we know where this is going? Resistance, rebellion, exposure, reconciliation, marriage. The model, I thought, was not so much Dickens as Trollope, with the balanced attention to an array of closely connected characters, the patient chronological unfolding of events (and then, and then, and then…) without narrative tricks or rhetorical flamboyance, and the evidence of incremental changes to social manners and mores, the gentle but persistent ceding of one generation’s norms to another’s.

But it didn’t take long for this complacent sense of “I know where this is going” to be disrupted. Denied her romantic officer, the beautiful daughter placidly accepts marriage to another suitor of her father’s choice (one whom she does not meet until the match is made). She relocates to her husband’s house and is essentially removed from the main action of the story. Denied his Mariam, the son harbors some quiet regrets until one day word reaches him that she has been seen smiling (yes, smiling) at an English soldier, and that’s the end of any lingering fondness. In other words, this family accepts the authority of their father–and this is even after they become aware of his double life, the chief effect of which revelation is to encourage another son in his own pursuit of pleasure. Another development that I thought at first foretold rebellion: Amina, the faithful, obedient (I would say, servile) wife, goes on a short expedition while her husband is absent, to visit a nearby mosque. On the way back she is struck by a car, making it impossible to keep the outing a secret. As soon as her broken collar bone is healed, Al-Sayyid Ahmad kicks her out of the house, sending her back to her mother’s to await his final decision–will he take her back, after such outrageous defiance of his authority? (She went out to a mosque, remember, while he goes out every night to drink, sing, and make love to his mistress.) We know where this would go in a Trollope novel–he’d end up a raving monomaniac in a remote Italian villa. But he takes her back, and, more to my point, she waits patiently for his decision and returns with joy to her cloistered existence, her family responsibilities, and his authority.

My frustration with these aspects of the novel reveal the way formal expectations merge with ideological ones. As I was reading, I kept feeling as if the novel had lost its momentum. Where was it going, if not along the paths I kept foreseeing? But the problem was (is) with me, not (or not necessarily, or not solely) with the novel. I wanted something for this family that, I gradually figured out, it did not want for itself: call it rebellion, or reform, or modernization, or something else. Perhaps it would be right to say that I wanted it to be an English family, rather than an Egyptian one. It’s not that the novel does not show any difficulties with the exercise of the father’s power, or any alternative possibilities, including greater freedom of movement and expression for women (though barely, and peripherally, and often inviting a cloud of negative judgments). The hedonistic son, for instance, is divorced at the insistence of his wife and her family after he is caught making a move on a female servant (though I think it’s possible that the real problem in this case is not that he is unfaithful but that he can’t keep his lust under control and away from his home). But the novel is not about challenging the overall structure or values of their lives in these respects, at least not as far as I can tell. My expectations–my wishes–for them reflected values I brought with me to the novel, values that were challenged by their own commitments, both social and religious, and the dramatic tension and comic resolution I sought were not applicable in their case.

What is Palace Walk about, then? Well, like a Trollope novel, it seems to be as much about the day to day things people do and say as about anything more thematically specific: it’s a “slice of life” novel, and thus requires no major narrative arc to sustain itself. A plot emerges to do with Egyptian resistance to British control, and this plot does culminate in some dramatic events, but they have not been motivated by a consistent or compelling focus on political or other grievances, and they do not draw together or provide a unifying climax for the novel’s varying events or characters (in the way we would expect of a Dickens novel). It’s just one more series of events–though through it we are given a thorough refutation of Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s wish for his children to live “apart, outside the framework of history” so that “he alone would set their course for them” (422). If this intention of his had been declared earlier, and more of the novel devoted to showing its futility, perhaps the novel’s conclusion would have more than personal resonance. Or perhaps the other two novels in the trilogy pick up and run with the revolutionary potential, both of the individual characters’ fates, and of the realization that personal life is, must be, political and that Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s patriarchal authority and imperious will cannot inhibit the forces of historical change. Maybe, in other words, across the larger series the novel I was expecting emerges.

Other features of the novel interested me as I went along: the style and rhythm to the conversations, for instance, which often (as in Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s flirtations with Zubayda) have a theatrical quality, as if language is used as much for rhetorical display and competition as for direct expression. It can seem unnatural or artifical, but my impression from other things I’ve read by and about Arabic writers is that this is a characteristic or tradition of Arabic speech, one that presumably the translator here has been careful to capture. The characters’ speech is also permeated with religious references, particularly quotations from or allusions to the Qu’ran; commonplace as Biblical allusions are in the British novels with which I am most familiar, the pervasive assumption of religious authority and purpose is rarely, if ever, conveyed in this way. And sometimes I was struck by patterns of imagery or metaphor that did not seem to translate comfortably, as here, for example:

These hearts, distracted from their sorrows by their mother’s, began to think again about their own worries now they were reassured about their mother’s well-being. In the same way, when we have acute but temporary intestinal pain we forget our chronic eye inflammation, but once the intestinal distress is relieved, the pain in the eyes returns. (234)

Well, OK, that’s a clear enough analogy, but hardly poetic. Here’s another similarly blunt moment:

The moment a thought occurred to him, a memory stirred, someone mentioned her name, or anything similar happened, his heart would throb with pain and exude one grief after another. It was like a decayed tooth with an inflamed gum. For a time the toothache may die down until the tooth presses against a morsel of food or touches a solid object. Then the pain erupts. (258)

Perhaps there’s a tradition of medical metaphors that works better in Arabic.

One reason I was curious to read Palace Walk is to broaden the context for my work on Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun. She names a number of English novelists, specifically George Eliot, as influences on her, but is also obviously familiar with Egyptian and Arabic literature, and Mahfouz is probably the most famous Egyptian novelist. It seemed to me that I should read–because I would learn from–novels written out of different traditions, if only to check myself from making assumptions about Soueif’s work based on knowing one side of her hybrid literary inheritance. That I felt so blundering working my way through Palace Walk certainly confirmed this opinion for me, and that I ended up feeling fond of, if frustrated by, so many of the people I met in the novel makes me think it won’t be out of obligation only that I’ll go on and read the next two books in the trilogy.