Author: Rohan Maitzen

Adam Bede at The Valve: The Final Post

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(cross-posted)

The final installment of our Adam Bede reading project is up at The Valve. If you’ve been reading along, do come over and leave a comment! Here’s my ‘starter’ post:

First, in case anyone is inspired to go back and read through the posts and comments in sequence, here they are:

Was Adam Bede the best choice for a project like this? I don’t know, but clearly some people enjoyed it, or at least persevered with it, and probably we all know things we didn’t know before, whether about George Eliot, Dutch painting, fanfic, or just ourselves as readers. I don’t have any sense of how many people were reading along but not commenting. If there are any of you still lurking out there, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to say a few words about you and your experience of reading Adam Bede this summer. I’m sure the people who have been commenting all along don’t need any special prompting from me to add their own last words!

A thumbnail version of my own reaction on this rereading of the novel is that it’s an extraordinary first book. (I know: Scenes of Clerical Life was her first published fiction, but it’s a different kind of thing.) My initial inability to read it without making mental connections and comparisons to her later work came to confirm for me that she learned how to do, better, many of the things she is trying to do here, novelistically and artistically as well as philosophically and dramatically. But she could already do remarkable things in all of these categories, from passages of memorable wisdom and poignancy in the intrusive narration to scenes of striking pathos and suspense, such as Hetty’s forlorn pilgrimage. If Adam is a bit of a stump (though arguably better, as a hunk, than Felix Holt a couple of novels later), he is excellent practice for Caleb Garth; Mr Irwine fumbles the ball Mr Farebrother will pick up and run with; Dorothea is a thoroughly secularized saint–but Mrs Poyser is as good as a Dickens character, and I mean that without irony, someone who livens up your imagination from having lived in it for a while. The overall structure seems beautifully balanced, better than The Mill on the Floss (heavily weighted, GE admitted, towards the childhood scenes and so rushed through to the end), and the set pieces such as the birthday feast work better for me for my having considered them (like the harvest supper at the end) in light of the painterly analogies explored in Yeazell’s book. But here my own limitations and preoccupations are showing: I’m thinking about the novel in the context of GE’s other novels, and there are lots of other ways we could go.

In closing, then, here’s my favourite passage from the last section of the novel. I think it captures something that really struck me this time about the underlying tone of the story, in which nostalgia for the past is charged with mourning (it’s the past, after all, and not to be recovered) but at the same time counteracted with energy for a new life richer with meaning and sympathy because of that history, just as Adam’s love for Dinah is stronger, not weaker, because of their shared memories of Hetty. We can’t really long for the past because we are no longer the same people:

It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it–if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy–the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.

And, a bit later on,

The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength: we can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy, than a painter or musician can wish to return to his cruder manner, or a philosopher to his less complete formula.

As someone who has a few times this summer felt strongly inclined to “hide her eyes in selfish complaining” (Middlemarch Ch. 80), I can at least aspire to this condition of mental growth and “added strength.” It’s not what everyone reads for (not me either, not all the time), but it’s one good thing to take away an idea about how the bad and the good in one’s life might come together to make one a more sympathetic person.

Summer Re-Run: Joanna Trollope, Anne Tyler, and Renunciation

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(originally posted June 15, 2007)

Since writing this post I haven’t read any more Joanna Trollope, but I have read Anne Tyler’s Digging to America and basically enjoyed it–though not as much as some of my old favourites. And I have continued to worry about the problem of reconciling duty to self with duty to others, certainly one of the central difficulties of George Eliot’s novels. (Is this a particularly female theme, I wonder?)

When I decided to take a break from more “serious” reading with Joanna Trollope‘s A Village Affair, I wasn’t really expecting the novel to reach towards the serious itself. I had read it before, but what I had retained was admiration for the clarity with which Trollope gives us the people she has devised: many (though not all) of her novels that I have read have struck me as achieving an enviable quality in their characters: they are enormously specific and individual and often intensely, even poignantly, believable. Here, Alice’s father-in-law, Richard, seems especially well conceived. Everything he says communicates to us who he is and how he has lived, particularly in his marriage to a woman he persists in loving but who cannot, in her turn, recognize in him someone as complex and fully human as she is. He lives this hampered life in full knowledge of its limits, neither tragic nor stoic. Alice’s discontent is the stuff of cliches; her affair seems contrived (by the author) to break up the seemingly calm surface, the routines and compromises of daily life. In fact, this is how Trollope’s plots generally work: the ordinary people, the change or revelation, the repercussions. For me, it’s the repercussions she does really well. Having set up her experiment in life, she works out plausibly how it will play out, and she does not sentimentalize–as, in this case, Alice’s “coming alive” through a new and different experience of love creates more problems than it solves.

In this case, as in another of her novels that I think is very smart, Marrying the Mistress, Trollope sets her characters up to confront what is a central dilemma in many 19th-century novels as well, namely how to resolve the conflict between, or how to decide between, duty to self and duty to others. That she is aware of her predecessors in this investigation is indicated by the quotation from Adam Bede recited (OK, improbably) by one of the characters in A Village Affair. As that quotation forcefully indicates, George Eliot placed a high value on renunciation and on accepting (as gracefully as possible) the burden of duty: resignation to less than you want, or less than you can imagine, is a constant refrain, and this with no promise of rapturous happiness. Hence the melancholic tinge at the end of Romola, for instance, or Daniel Deronda, or, for all its lightning flashes of romantic fulfilment, Middlemarch. (Of course, famously, it is her heroines who must resign or, like Maggie Tulliver, die.)

Although much has changed socially and politically since George Eliot found it unrealistic to give Romola, Maggie, or Dorothea uncompromised happy endings, the struggle between what we want for ourselves and what is expected or demanded of us by others continues to be a staple of fiction. Though Trollope’s scenario is much more contemporary, she too accepts that one’s individual desire cannot (or not easily, or not ethically) be one’s guiding principle, because of the “visible and invisible relations beyond any of which our present or prospective self is the centre” (Adam Bede). So Trollope, with admirable restraint, refuses a fairy tale ending for her protagonist, though, with a different kind of insistence that perhaps George Eliot would respect, she also pushes her out of the unsatisfactory life that was her reality before, and into what, given this context, seems like a narrative limbo, or a waiting room. This is not to say that Alice’s single life is an incomplete one, but she herself acknowledges that it is not, in fact, what she really wanted–only what she was capable of achieving.

I think this novel makes an interesting comparison to another quiet novel about a woman reconsidering her life, Anne Tyler‘s Ladder of Years, which I have always admired. But Tyler, though far from offering simplistic fairy tales, offers her own version of the resignation narrative. In Ladder of Years, as in Back When We Were Grownups, it proves mistaken for the heroine to try to start a new life, however much she is, or believes she is, following the promptings of her innermost self. Again, the “visible and invisible relations” exert a powerful pressure, like the entangling webs of family and society in Middlemarch but perceived, overall, as more kindly, less petty and destructive. The plain litte room Delia takes and uses as a staging ground to reinvent her life is a room of her own, but her story is not rightly understood as being just about her own life (“was she alone,” Dorothea asks herself). In these novels Tyler’s women learn to appreciate the value of what they tried to leave, to see their own identities as having become inseparable from those of the others whose demands and complications hamper their desires. The vision seems starker in Trollope’s novel (“Aga saga” though it certainly is).

Weekend Miscellany: Mr Whicher, James Wood, Reader Online Poll

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It’s ‘Halifax Natal Day’ here (also known as ‘we want an extra day off in August too’) and thus still in some sense the weekend, so here’s my semi-regular round-up of interesting things:

At The Little Professor, there’s a typically thoughtful review of Kate Summerscale’s much-discussed The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, the story of the infamous Road Hill murder case and its lead investigator:

Summerscale’s project wears a number of intellectual hats: it aspires to be, simultaneously, a popular microhistory of a scandalous murder case, a literary history of modern detective fiction, and a sort of detective “faction” in its own right. Summerscale’s story doesn’t just analyze the Road Hill case, but actually tries to be the kind of narrative the murder inspired; the reader is invited to watch as new forms of story-telling coalesce into recognizable genre conventions.

LP isn’t entirely sold on the project: for her reasons, read the rest here.
Open Letters Monthly features Daniel Green‘s review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Not surprisingly, given the differences between their critical agendas and the resulting history of contention between Green and Wood, the review is not particularly enthusiastic:

Wood is currently the most well-regarded generalist literary critic in the English-speaking literary world, and it is discouraging to say the least that such a figure uses his influence to conduct a rearguard action against the forces of change in literary practice, against those who, like William Gass (Wood’s bête noire in this book), want to transform our perception of fiction as the effort to depict “people” and “life” to one that can encompass that goal (with many provisos) but can also capture the reader’s attention in other ways, ways more responsive to the possibilities of fiction as imaginative manipulation of language and form. Wood makes his case for realism always within a context in which it is endangered by postmodernists and other stylistically immoderate writers who don’t appreciate its subtleties and are tearing fiction away from its proper relationship to “the world.” . . . .

Ultimately the most disconcerting thing about How Fiction Works, and about James Wood’s criticism in general, is that while Wood on the one hand expresses near-reverence for the virtues of fiction, the terms in which he judges the value of fiction as a literary form implicitly disparages it. He doesn’t want to let fiction be fiction. Instead, he asks that it provide some combination of psychological analysis, metaphysics, and moral instruction, and assumes that novelists are in some way qualified to offer these services. He abjures them to avoid “aestheticism” (too much art) and to instead be respectful of “life.” (read the whole review here)

I find it interesting that Green repeatedly faults Wood for an over-zealous commitment to realism while my own reading of How Fiction Works expressed frustration rather at his tendency to emphasize aesthetics and form over plot, character, and “moral instruction,” and to universalize this priority and talk as if the novel really began with Flaubert.

At The Reader Online, they have a winner in their poll to select a classic novel to recommend for the Richard and Judy book club, which I gather has something of the force across the pond that Oprah’s book club has here. Their favored selection is Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a recommendation I would certainly second. In retrospect, I actually wonder if it wouldn’t have been a better choice for our summer reading project at The Valve: though I’ve certainly been pleased overall at the discussion we’ve had of Adam Bede, something a bit sexier might have kept more people engaged once summer really arrived.

Summer Re-Run: Vikram Seth, An Equal Music

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(originally posted June 5, 2007)

2008 Update: An Equal Music was definitely one of my favourite reads of 2007. I did get the soundtrack, too, and have listened to it many times, though I have yet to reread the novel with it playing on my iPod. I have some other favourite books that also entwine their plots and characters closely with music. One, which I would like to write up soon as part of a thread about books that stand now as old friends, is Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s wonderful Disturbances in the Field; another, brilliantly and darkly comic, is Angela Huth’s Easy Silence (which sadly seems to be unavailable everywhere I checked); and another is Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. (I did find while reading Bel Canto that many of its ‘tracks’ were on my iPod, and it definitely took the reading experience to another level to coordinate the words and the sounds. In fact, it occurs to me that these books would lend themselves well to multimedia editions, for just that reason.) Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading names several more musical books in this post from last February, many of which sound extremely interesting.

What an extraordinary, intense, poignant book. The central love story is compelling as a romance but would be conventional, perhaps even trite, if it weren’t entangled with another story about a different kind of love–for music. Michael’s desire for Julia, which borders on the obsessive, is itself a musical passion, aroused by and motivated by her playing, or their playing together. But his desire for his violin comes to seem like a purer form of desire, for something that transcends the impurities of human relationships or even human characters, with their flaws and imbalances. People (alas!) cannot be tuned to accommodate different needs, to make new or different combinations, new beauties. How utopian chamber music comes to seem here, as the members of the quartet ease away from their messy lives through the simplicity of a scale played in unison, until they are ready and generous enough to take their turns, to share the work and the pleasure of the music. But though I felt it this way, the novel itself is never sentimental.

In his “Author’s Note” Seth remarks that he felt “gripped with anxiety” at the thought of writing about music, to him “dearer even than speech.” Perhaps as a result, he uses a spare but high-pressure style, relentlessly paced, never indulgent; the moments of grace appear as just that, moments in a turbulent, complicated world, themselves achieved by hard work, constant rehearsal, trial and error. Even the risky conceit of Julia’s hearing loss is handled coolly; like Michael, we shy away from pity even as we wonder how and why she can continue to make music she can hear fully only in her head. Beethoven too, we know, of course made music even after he could not hear it himself. In Julia’s case (she’s a fictional character, after all) we might ask if there is a metaphorical or symbolic dimension. Characters lose their sight in order to gain insight; is music here also a state of mind or perception from which sensory experience is a distraction? “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter”? But in the end it does seem to be the “heard melodies” that matter here, outweighing and outlasting every other desire, met or unmet, every painful, joyful love:

Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music–not too much, or the soul could not sustain it–from time to time.

Some love stories leave us longing (no doubt in vain) for that “happily ever after” ending, the miraculously harmonious human relationship. This one has left me longing for Bach and Schubert.

Follow-up: To my joy, it turns out there is a companion CD for this novel. I eagerly await its arrival and, eventually, a second reading of the novel complete with soundtrack.

Mysterious Reading Update

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I’ve begun working my way through some of the books I’m considering as additions or alternatives in my Mystery and Detective Fiction course (thanks to everyone who offered suggestions and advice). So far, I’m not sold on any of the ones I’ve read.

I really didn’t enjoy Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers: like Miriam, I found it nearly “unreadable,” perhaps, as she proposes, because of a poor translation, but also I didn’t like either Wallander or the crime story particularly. To be sure, I don’t have to like a book to assign it, but then I need to see it as offering something important and new to the class, and I already have an example of a gloomy police procedural featuring a dysfunctional, divorced, hard-drinking detective. I also don’t have to assign the first book in the series and maybe they get better, so I’ll probably browse a couple more to test this first impression.

In a strange way, I did enjoy Chester Himes’s A Rage in Harlem, which is certainly one of the more surprising books I’ve read in any genre. It’s not really a detective novel: I think it’s best categorized as a “caper” story, or, as one reviewer in the cover blurb says, a “mayhem” story. It is grim and violent but surreally comic at the same time. One of the more spectacular scenes is a car chase through Harlem featuring a hearse loaded with a dead body and a trunk supposedly containing gold ore. An excerpt will give a sense of Himes’s striking, high-velocity prose as well as the outlandish character of the novel:

When Jackson took off in the big old Cadillac hearse down Park Avenue, he didn’t know where he was going. He was just running. He clung to the wheel with both hands. His bulging eyes were set in a fixed stare on the narrow strip of wet brick pavement as it curled over the hood like an apple-peeling from a knife blad, as though he were driving underneath it. On one side the iron stanchions of the trestle flew past like close-set fence pickets, on the other the store-fronted sidewalk made one long rushing somber kaleidoscope in the gray light before dawn.

The deep steady thunder of the supercharger spilled out behind. The open back-doors swung crazily on the bumpy road, battering the head of the corpse as it jolted up and down beneath the bouncing trunk.

He headed into the red traffic light at 116th Street doing eighty-five miles an hour. He didn’t see it. A sleepy taxi driver saw something black go past in front of him and thought he was seeing automobile ghosts. . . .

“Runaway hearse! Runaway hearse!” voices screamed.

The hearse ran into crates of iced fish spread out on the sidewalk, skidded with a heavy lurch, and veered against the side of the refrigerator truck. The back doors were flung wide and the throat-cut corpse came one-third out. The gory head hung down from the cut throat to stare at the scene of devastation from its unblinking white-walled eyes. . . .

Jackson went along 95th Street to Fifth Avenue. When he saw the stone wall surrounding Central Park he realized he was out of Harlem. He was down in the white world with no place to go, no place to hide his woman’s gold ore, no place to hide himself. He was going at seventy miles an hour and there was a stone wall ahead.

The climactic scenes involve a gender-bending character named Billie:

She was a brown-skinned woman in her middle forties, with a compact husky body filling a red gabardine dress. With a man’s haircut and a smooth, thick, silky mustache, her face resembled that of a handsome man. But her body was a cross. The top two buttons of the dress were open, and between her two immense uplifed breasts was a thick growth of satiny black hair.

Billie knows how to defend her own:

She put her whole weight in a down-chopping blow and sank the sharp blade of the axe into the side of his neck with such force it hewed through the spinal column and left his head dangling over his left shoulder on a thin strip of flesh, the epithet still on his lips.

Blood geysered from red stump of neck over the fainting girl as Billie dropped the axe, picked her bodily in her arms, and showered her with kisses.

It’s all sort of awesomely horrible. Honestly, I wouldn’t know where to start if I were teaching this novel. But my curiosity about Himes is certainly piqued, so I’m going to look into his novels that focus more clearly on his detectives, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones.

Stylistically, I’m impressed at what I’ve read of Yasmina Khadra’s Double Blank, one of the few of his detective novels I found at my public library. (I actually don’t read much literature in translation, so here and with the Mankell I was puzzled at where to lay the blame or credit for the qualities of the prose, but since I would have to work with the English version, what matters in the end is how well it reads.) But it takes me so far afield from what I usually teach in terms of historical and cultural context that I think it would be difficult for me to do an adequate job of it.

So: more to read, more to think about. In the meantime, I’ve also learned of what looks like an excellent anthology to consider as an alternative to the one I’ve been using, the Oxford Book of Detective Stories: the Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction. Just going by the product description, it seems to have a good selection of primary material but also an interesting array of critical supplements. It’s not clear to me yet that it would be available for my class in an acceptable format. Perhaps its limited availability in Canada explains why I hadn’t turned it up before, though it is not a new volume.

Summer Reading Project: Adam Bede (Chapters 36-48)

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This week’s installment of our summer reading project at The Valve brings us to the emotional and moral climax of Adam Bede. This is a section full of pathos, suspense, and melodrama as we follow Hetty on her journeys in hope and despair, as we see the painful process by which Adam and our other friends at Hayslope are brought into knowledge and suffering by “the terrible illumination which the present sheds back upon the past,” and as we go with Dinah into Hetty’s dark cell. How far do the lessons we have been offered about sympathy and forgiveness move us past the horror of this moment:

‘I hadn’t got far out of the road into one of the open places, before I heard a strange cry. I thought it didn’t come from any animal I knew, but I wasn’t for stopping to look about just then. But it went on, and seemed so strange to me in that place, I couldn’t help stopping to look. . . . And I looked about among them, but could find nothing; and at last the cry stopped. So I was for giving it up, and I went on about my business. But when I came back the same way pretty nigh an hour after, I couldn’t help laying down my stakes to have another look. And just as I was stooping and laying down the stakes, I saw something odd and round and whitish lying on the ground under a nut-bush by the side of me. And I stooped down on hands and knees to pick it up. And I saw it was a little baby’s hand.’

How far, also, is the dramatic turn of events at the end of Chapter XLVII a break from the novel’s program of realism? I’m also interested in Bartle Massey’s role in this section as well as Mr. Irwine’s, and in the structural symmetries of many of the scenes here to earlier ones. As always, everyone is welcome to pitch in on these or any other topics as the comments thread unfolds at The Valve.

Summer Re-Run: Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

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My new reading right now is mostly samples of the books I’m considering for my Mystery and Detective Fiction course, and I don’t have much to say about them at this point, so I thought that over the next couple of weeks I’d re-post and lightly update a couple of earlier things that otherwise would just be languishing in my archives. I have a few more regular readers now than I once did (hey, any number is greater than zero, right?), so, as the networks say, some of them may be “new to you.” I’ll write new posts too, of course.

Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

(originally posted March 5, 2007)

I’ve been eagerly waiting for the paperback edition of this novel, as I am a big fan of Fingersmith (such a smart novel, artistically and intellectually) and was thoroughly entertained by Tipping the Velvet. The Night Watch too was easily readable, deceptively so, I’ve ended up thinking, as I moved through it smoothly only to arrive at the end feeling quite dissatisfied with how I had read it. The backwards chronological structure, for instance, seemed an artificial device, until on a bit of reflection and then with some help from some of the novel’s reviewers, I began to think more about ways it suits the kind of character development Waters seems to be engaged in: it’s a kind of up-ended Bildungsroman in which rather than seeing people growing into themselves, we peel back the layers of their past experience to see what lies beneath the people they have become. Now I wonder if there isn’t a way in which Waters’s approach has, perversely almost, a strong forward momentum for the characters, as we realize how complex and contingent their ‘current’ identities are and how much they (or their situations) have changed over time: instead of seeing them as having arrived, we see them as poised just ahead of their next transformation: their next relationship, their next disappointment or tragedy, their next moment of hope. At the same time, the glimpses of beauty and hope (such as Helen’s face at the end/beginning) are so overlayed with our knowledge of change and (usually) destruction that the overall effect seems more disheartening than otherwise: it’s too bad, I kept thinking, that this moment here had to turn out the way I already know it did. One reviewer commented that the novel needed to be read twice, and I certainly expect it will seem quite different on a second reading, as the characters’ experiences that are presented so elliptically in the first section will feel much more concrete. I like the simplicity of Waters’s prose–also deceptive, as the novel is clearly the result of much research and is effortlessly laden (if that’s not oxymoronic) with period details. But I would also appreciate some exposition, a thicker layer of narrative commentary, even some philosophizing! Waters’s touch is so light that I find it hard to be sure what she thinks is important about the moment she has chosen, or why she develops the kinds of characters and linkages she does. Why write about the 1940s now, for instance? ‘Showing’ is all very well, but (and perhaps this is just the Victorianist in me) I like the author to collaborate more actively with me on these questions; otherwise I have the sensation of having seen or felt a series of images and moments, but I have not grasped a strong idea. For this, a little ‘telling’ would be in order.

Update: Having recently read Affinity, I’m all caught up on Waters now.

Adam Bede at The Valve: Book Four (Chapters 27-35)

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(cross-posted)

Our group reading of Adam Bede continues at The Valve. This week’s installment includes the immortal Mrs. Poyser having “her say out”:

“Yis, I know I’ve done it,” said Mrs Poyser, “but I’ve had my say out, and I shall be th’ easier for ‘t all my life. There’s no pleasure i’ living, if you’re to be corked up for iver, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.”

To which any one of us who has ever been accused of speaking out of turn (or just speaking too much) can say a hearty “hear, hear!”

Now, too, we’ve reached, not the crisis of the book, but a crisis at least, as Arthur’s guilty secret comes out and he and Adam face off “with the instinctive fierceness of panthers.”

One of the most compelling aspects of this volume for me is Arthur’s growing realization of one of GE’s most stringent moral laws: you cannot escape your deeds:

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a man’s critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character. There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this reason–that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right. . . . Europe adjusts itself to a fait accompli, and so does an individual character,–until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution.

She returns to the fatality of action in Romola—

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.

and again in Middlemarch—

1st Gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
2nd Gent. Ay, truly, but I think it is the world
That brings the iron.

How often, in George Eliot’s fiction, do past deeds return to haunt, confound, or indict those who seek to leave their pasts behind? Your own actions are her version of Nemesis, as many critics have pointed out; when disaster comes, most of the time you have only yourself to blame–or, yourself and the particular “combination of outward with inward facts” that has created the context in which your actions became inevitable. Often, though, she embodies that doom: Baldassare confronts Tito, Raffles returns to Bulstrode–here Hetty and her unborn child represent Arthur’s moral degradation. One explanation that is sometimes given for the length and detail of George Eliot’s novels (in which, as has been pointed out here, there is often a long, largely discursive prelude to any distinct event) is that these outward and inward circumstances need to be established fully enough that we can appreciate the causes of the action, as well as anticipate the consequences. This is her idea of determinism, summed up by George Levine (in “Determinism and Responsibility in the Works of George Eliot,” PMLA 77:3, 1962) as an “idea-simple at bottom but leading to enormous complications-that every event has its causal antecedents.” Here’s a bit more of Levine’s explanation of this theory:

George Eliot saw a deterministic universe as a marvelously complex unit in which all parts are intricately related to each other, where nothing is really isolable, and where past and future are both implicit in the present. Nothing in such a universe is explicable without reference to the time and place in which it occurs or exists. This suggested that one can never make a clearcut break with the society in which one has been brought up, with one’s friends and relations, with one’s past. Any such break diminishes a man’s wholeness and is the result of his failure to recognize his ultimate dependence on others, their claims on him, and the consequent need for human solidarity. For George Eliot, every man’s life is at the center of a vast and complex web of causes,” a good many of which exert pressure on him from the outside and come into direct conflict with his own desires and motives.

Of course, as Levine discusses in detail, this view went hand-in-hand for her with a stringent commitment to individual responsibility. Interestingly, Levine uses Adam Bede to illustrate this point:

The point is that although every action is caused, few causes are uncontrollable in the sense that no effort to alter them can succeed. As long as the cause is not a compulsion, that is, as long as it is not physically impossible or excessively dangerous to will differently and as long as one is not so mentally ill that one cannot will differently even if one wants to, one is responsible for his actions. To take an example: in Adam Bede, Arthur Donnithorne was free to avoid the circumstances which drew him into sexual relations with Hetty Sorrel. He was aware that he should have told Mr. Irwine about his feelings, but he chose not to. And even though he was helped in avoiding confession by Irwine’s overly decorous refusal to make him talk, Arthur was under no compulsion to be silent. At one point in the conversation between Arthur and Irwine, Irwine figuratively and implicitly makes the distinction between cause and compulsion. Arthur says to him:

“Well, but one may be betrayed into doing things by a combination of circumstances, which one might never have done otherwise.” “Why, yes [Irwine replies], a man can’t very well steal a bank-note unless the bank-note lies within convenient reach; but he won’t make us think him an honest man because he begins to howl at the banknote for falling in his way.” (Ch. XVI)

The bank-note’s presence, that is to say, is one of the causes of the theft, but there is nothing in its presence serving as a compulsion to make a man steal it.

This is one line of interpretation we might wish to pursue, but as always, questions and comments on any topic are welcome.

In case anyone needs reminders or is joining in a bit belatedly, the overall schedule is here. Previous discussions have covered Chapters 1-5, Chapters 6-11, Chapters 12-16, Chapters 17-21, and Chapters 22-26.

Novel Readings are Good for You

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

The Globe and Mail‘s books section this weekend includes an “endpaper” by Liam Durcan touching on some of the recent research into the benefits of reading fiction:

In a recent study conducted by University of Toronto psychologists, subjects who read a short story in The New Yorker had higher scores on social reasoning tests than those who had read an essay from the same magazine. The researchers concluded that there was something in the experience of reading fiction that made the subjects more empathetic (or at least take a test more empathetically). The study provided some proof for what has often been intuitively argued: Fiction is, in some very important ways, good for us. (read the rest here)

I’m reasonably confident that the “University of Toronto psychologists” involved would include the authors of the interesting blog On Fiction. Inquiring into the and why of these effects, Durcan also cites Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction, which explores literary reading in the context of developmental psychology, particularly “theory of mind”:

Zunshine, who is part of a growing school of cognitive literary theorists, goes so far as to describe the novel as a “sustained theory of mind exercise.” As we read the multilayered intentionalities of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, we not only experience complex and contingent mental states, but we evaluate them as well, and as the narrative moves forward, we use our skills as mind readers, constantly testing our hypotheses about this fictional world and its experimental personalities.

Using Nabokov’s Pale Fire as an example, Zunshine relates how severely our theory-of-mind abilities can be tested and how ably we respond when she describes the creeping unease and perverse thrill, well known to any reader, that come with the unmasking of an unreliable narrator. The ambiguities and psychological nuances that characterize fiction provide an unrivalled training ground for our abilities as readers of mental states.

Durcan raises the inevitable and important point that, while “a taste for fiction” may contribute to the development of empathy and thus, we might hope, morality, it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for either: “the list of highly cultured and well-read despots is depressingly long.” (Richard Posner emphasizes this problem in “Against Ethical Criticism,”responding to Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, the latter of whom in particular has made strong claims, in works such as Poetic Justice, for the social and other goods that reading fiction might enhance.) Nonetheless, as Durcan concludes,

Fiction offers the transformative experience of getting out of our heads and into the head of “the other.” And from that privileged vantage point, anything is possible. Perhaps even the chance to see ourselves more clearly.

One of the strongest proponents of this theory is, of course, George Eliot:

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.

Her novels, which she called “experiments in life,” are also experiments in bringing about such “transformative” experiences by knocking her readers askew from their usual “vantage points” and into the heads of others.

I do think one of the challenges of these hopeful approaches to fiction is figuring out how it matters which fiction in particular people read. Even empathy, after all, is not a universal good; I’m reminded of Wayne Booth’s comments on Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur (in The Rhetoric of Fiction):

The book is a brilliant culmination of more than a hundred years of experimentation with inside views and the sympathetic identification they can yield. It does, indeed, lead us to experience intensely the sensations and emotions of a homicidal maniac. But is this really what we go to literature for?

A fair question! And presumably it also matters how we read what we read–an inquiry which might go some way towards explaining the “cultured despots” phenomenon.

Mysterious Reading Plans

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As I’ve remarked a few times in recent posts, I’m hoping to shake up the reading list for my class on Mystery and Detective Fiction. I introduced it in 2003, and the major texts have been basically the same each time I’ve taught it: some Poe and Conan Doyle and various other short fiction, depending on the anthology I’ve got; Collins’s The Moonstone, Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Sue Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi, and Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses.

I’ve been having a hard time choosing additions or alternatives, partly because I’m not really an avid reader of mysteries (too often I find them formulaic or gimmicky, or too grim) so the work of filtering out the good or the significant is unappealing. My own taste tends to wordy, British-style character-driven ones, but between P. D. James, Peter Robinson, Elizabeth George, and Ian Rankin, I don’t run out of books to read, and when I want something pithier, well, Robert B. Parker and Dick Francis too keep providing me with new ones (just this weekend I whipped through Now and Then, and last weekend it was Spare Change). I’ve picked up some new authors recently: I like Deborah Crombie well enough, for instance, and for no good reason there are a lot of Reginald Hill titles I haven’t read yet, so I’ve done some catching up. And I keep up with Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, though I have been finding them kind of flat lately. But what I feel I need for my course is not more of the same kinds already represented on my syllabus but more variety, and some indication of new directions the genre might be going, and no matter how many titles I bring home to take a look at, few leap out as significant or interesting enough to put on a syllabus. So I’ve solicited (and received) suggestions a couple of times here and asked around among my mystery-reading friends and family, and I’ve also been browsing a lot online, where of course there are many sources of information and recommendations, including the excellent blogs Petrona and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. I had in mind a more diverse list of writers, perhaps something Canadian, perhaps something from the vast array of ‘international’ crime writers. Here is a list of the titles or authors I’ve come up with from which I hope to draw my new material:

I’ve gathered most of these titles up from the public library and plan a serious course of crime reading over the next couple of weeks (when I’m not reading Adam Bede, of course!). I remain open to suggestions!

The other thought I’ve had, as I work my way through The Wire (just wrapped Season 3), is that it would be exciting and appropriate to work TV in somehow. I’ve included Prime Suspect I in my seminar on Women and Detective Fiction, including this summer, and not only do the themes and action of the series work extremely well with the overall interests of the course, but the shift in genre and medium gives us a lot more to think and talk about. Crime shows are certainly a staple of television drama–but how can it be done? Also, of course, as a television (or film) critic I am a rank amateur, so how could I be sure to do it well?