Research That Matters: Knowledge and Novelty

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

OK, I admit it. My previous post about reading and research is also disingenuous. In a university context, research is not just “purposeful reading” or “reading in pursuit of knowledge” or “reading directed towards solving a problem or answering a question.” University-level research, research that is publishable in professional venues, research that is eligible for funding, is research that produces new knowledge.  The research mission of a university is to move the frontier of knowledge, to add to the world’s sum of knowledge, to be at the cutting edge of knowledge… I know that! I’m only sort of pretending not to know it when I ask why research that serves other academic purposes, including teaching and individual intellectual development, does not earn a researcher the same support or the same professional credit.

But I’m pretending not to know it because “the pursuit of new knowledge” is not as obvious, or as easily applied, a principle as it sounds. One possible line of questioning begins with “new to whom?” The degree of hyper-specialization that characterizes the contemporary university is the result of the standard answer: new to other specialists in the field. This is obviously the right standard, isn’t it? It doesn’t advance knowledge to repeat what has been done before, to redo what has been tested. You can’t discover what is already known; you can’t have progress in a field unless you are constantly finding out something new.

This makes perfect sense, right? And yet it isn’t 100% obvious that what I’ve just said applies as well to literary research as it does to, say, research in genetics. What counts as a “discovery” in literary scholarship? Turning up a lost manuscript? OK, that’s an easy one. Explicating and contextualizing the work of a previously unknown or little-known author? Yes, good. Overturning a longstanding theoretical paradigm? Yup, I think so. Proposing a new reading of a novel based on paying attention to a detail nobody has ever paid attention to before? Well, OK. Contradicting a proposed new reading of a novel based on an alternative interpretation of a detail nobody has ever paid attention to before? Constructing a large theoretical claim based on readings of novels that pay attention to details usually disregarded? Yes, fine. Applying a theoretical framework from another discipline to a novel in order to read it in a way that it has never been read before? Yes! Of course! These are exactly the kinds of things literary scholars do (not all the things they do, but how long did you want this paragraph to get?). I wouldn’t argue that understanding texts in new ways doesn’t produce something reasonably called “knowledge.” At any rate, all of these activities affect the way we think about things. If our activity leads us and others to think in a new way, to see something in a new light, that moves some kind of frontier, surely.

But it seems to me there’s a difference that is at least worth thinking about between the importance of doing something new in genetics (or whatever) and pursuing novelty in literary studies. In some kinds of research, work that isn’t new and that doesn’t take into account every other recent discovery will be useless and irrelevant to anyone. But the drive towards novelty and hyper-specialization in literary studies is itself generating a great deal of work that is relevant only to other specialists, and even then, not so much. There is no large project or inquiry, after all, towards which incremental additions are being made; there’s just a proliferation of pieces often with little connection to each other. Even to other specialists, the work of keeping up is not only nearly impossible now, but also (and relatedly) of diminishing importance.

I’ve written about some aspects of this situation before, here in this post on Mark Bauerlein’s “The Research Bust.” I don’t think this kind of observation has to lead into an argument for the cessation of literary research, or for insisting that literary scholars return to doing only certain kinds of research that are more measurably productive of new information (for the case against literary “readings” and in favor of “a more traditionally scholarly conception of literary study”, see this post by D. G. Myers, also triggered by Bauerlein). One reason that I would support people continuing to do new readings is that we can’t be sure where inquiry will take us, and our sense of what “more traditionally scholarly” research is a priority might well be affected by ideas arising from rethinking texts we thought we already knew. If these new readings are truly driven by intellectual curiosity, by attempts to puzzle through problems, however abstract, then there’s value in them, for the researcher as well as for the audience of other people also interested. “Who can say,” as George Eliot remarks in Middlemarch, “what will be the effect of writing?” And I think we ought to have the same open-minded assumption about thinking. (If the research is not truly curiosity-driven, on the other hand, then we might remark, with Dorothea, “what could be sadder than so much ardent labour all in vain?”)

But I don’t think that the only paradigm for valuable work in literary studies should be one derived from a scientific model, as if a similar cumulative advance of information is ongoing, or one that disregards the other kinds of audiences there are for literary understanding. The reason the umpteenth interpretation of Middlemarch is important to at least some specialists is that they already know a whole lot about Middlemarch — but lots of people don’t, people who would be interested in knowing more. Our focus on novelty underestimates the value of what we already know, even though unlike old theories of the atom, old ideas about books have not lost their real-life significance; it also undervalues the skills we have at making what we know accessible to people who don’t know it yet, and reduces our audience to each other instead of trying to imagine how we could be part of the broader literary culture. The ‘cutting edge’ is actually a much less important place to be in literary studies (as well as a much more shifting territory).

 

“It is only War in the abstract that is beautiful”: Letters from a Lost Generation

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

This volume is subtitled “The First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends: Roland Leighton, Edward Brittain, Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow.” The editors, Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge, explain in their ‘Note to the Text’ that they have abridged the letters, sometimes significantly, in order to “lay bare the vivid and moving personal stories they tell, against the historical background of a cataclysm that destroyed four of the five writers.” In their ‘Introduction,’ they sum up the story the letters tell, one of “idealism, disillusionment, and personal tragedy.” Though excerpts always make me wonder whether the material omitted might have changed the story, there’s no doubt that the letters as presented here do follow just that arc. The four young men in the correspondence are all products of the British public school system which taught them the values they lived and then died for: “traditions of chivalry,” the editors explain, “the values of self-sacrifice, fair play, selfless patriotism, honour, duty.” War, in their view, was the ultimate proving ground for these qualities as well as their defense. Remnants of what can only look to us like a narrow-minded as well as naive idealism linger on throughout their letters, especially in their poignant wish to show courage in the face of incessant horror and imminent death: “I only hope I don’t fail at the critical moment,” writes Geoffrey, in what turns out to be his last letter to Vera, “as truly I am a horrible coward: wish I could do well especially for the School’s sake.” But it doesn’t take long for the realities of the trenches to disillusion them about war itself. “I used to talk of the Beauty of War,” Vera’s fiancé Roland writes to hear early in August 1915, “but it is only War in the abstract that is beautiful.”

After Roland’s death, in late December 1915, Vera’s brother Edward writes to her that Roland “considered that in War lay our one hope of salvation as a Nation, War where all the things things that do not matter are swept rudely aside and one gets down to the rock-bottom of the elementary facts of life.” Their friend Victor, the most militaristic of them (Geoffrey, in contrast, is the least militaristic, telling Vera that “he objects to War on principle”) argues at one point to Edward that “the Allies are God’s instrument by which He will remove that spirit and doctrine which is the cause of such Wars as this one.” To Vera, Victor writes that “The thing one appreciates in the life here more than anything else is the truly charming spirit of good fellowship & freedom from pettiness that prevails everywhere.” But these theoretical, wishful, or compensatory arguments are inadequate bulwarks against passages like this one:

I have been rushing around since 4 a.m. this morning superintending the building of dug-outs, drawing up plans for the draining of trenches, doing a little digging myself as a relaxation, and accidentally coming upon dead Germans while looting timber from what was once a German fire trench. This latter was captured by the French not so long ago and is pitted with shell holes each big enough to bury a horse or two in. The dug-outs have been nearly all blown in, the wire entanglements are a wreck, and in among this chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men who poured out their red sweet wine of youth unknowing, for nothing more tangible than Honour or their Country’s Glory or another’s Lust [for] Power. Let him who thinks that War is a glorious thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country with as thoughtless and fervid a faith as inspired the priests of Baal to call on their own slumbering deity, let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin bone and what might have been Its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, supported by one arm, perfect but that it is headless and with the tattered clothing still draped around it; and let him realise how grand & glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence. Who is there who has known & seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these? (Roland to Vera, 11 September 1915)

“It seems to me now,” Vera writes back soon after, “that this War is scarcely for victory at all, for even if victory comes it will be at the cost of so much else, so many greater things, that it will be scarcely worth having. No, this War will only justify itself if it puts an end to all the horror & barbarism & retrogression of War for ever.” After Roland’s belongings are returned to his family, Vera writes to Edward,

I was glad that neither you nor Victor nor anyone else who may some day go to the front was there to see. If you had been you would have been overwhelmed by the horror of war without its glory. For though he had only worn the things when living, the smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards & the Dead. The mud of France which covered them was not ordinary mud; it had not the usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was as though it were saturated with dead bodies – dead that had been dead a long, long time. All the sepulchres and catacombs of Rome could not make me realise mortality and corruption as vividly as did the smell of those clothes.

“Dear child,” Edward writes to Vera after the news of Geoffrey’s death, “there is no more to say; we have lost almost all there was to lose and what have we gained?”

What’s so surprising and touching about their letters is not what was gained or lost, but what was somehow retained–in spite of everything, you never lose the awareness that they are just (just!) five young people making their way forward a day at a time, in the best way they can find. They have school memories and career ambitions, favorite novels and poems, families that frustrate as well as comfort them. They worry, too, about how the war might be changing them. “I don’t think,” Roland writes to Vera, “that when one can still admire sunsets one has altogether lost the personality of pre-war days. I have been looking at a bloodred bar of sky creeping down behind the snow, and wondering whether any of the men in the trenches on the opposite hill were watching it too and thinking as I was what a waste of Life it is to spend it in a ditch.” Geoffrey’s final letter (paraphrased in Testament of Youth) includes an evocative description  of the trenches in the setting sun, a line of men “outlined against a pale yellow sky with dark purple clouds low down in the sky: over to the right tall trees astride a river also looking gold in the last rays of the sun and beyond the river more ruined houses from which occasionally flashed a large gun.” Though his life will so shortly be wasted, he at least has not lost his ability to appreciate that “it was all quite beautiful.”

Geoffrey’s letter ends with lines from Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “Safety” – “War knows no power safe shall be my going / Safe tho’ all safety’s lost, safe where men fall / And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.” (Vera to Edward: “I had a letter from him, within 3 days before his death, which was in all ways a farewell. . .. it made you feel that Death could not conquer a person of such fine & courageous natures.”) He had written earlier to Vera about Brooke: “Yes! I love Rupert Brooke & took him up with some of the other verses which Edward gave to me, to the trenches the last time but owing to wet, mud and squashed cake in my pack, which, the cake, seemed to permeate everything my edition is somewhat dilapidated now tho’ the dearer for that.” But much of their daily life is much more mundane than poetry, and that’s really where we realize “the pity of war.” There’s the long saga of Edward’s missing valise, for instance. Apparently claiming lost luggage wasn’t any easier in the trenches than it is with Air Canada: “I have got various papers on which to write my claim but I don’t konw when I shall have time to write it all out as it will probably take about 2 hours as it has to be done in duplicate,” he writes in some frustration to Vera, asking her to send along new shorts and sundries. Then there are his confidential remarks to Vera that he never seems to meet any “decent girls”–“Can you throw any light on the matter and do you think I shall ever meet the right one because at present I can’t conceive the possibility?” (Vera replies, “I think very probably that older women will appeal to you much more than younger ones”). These are the moments that restore these painfully young men to the normalcy that their extraordinary circumstances have stripped away, the moments that help us see them as our own sons or brothers or loved ones. “The reason why your last letter was so beautiful,” Victor writes to Edward in May 1916, “was because it was so very human. And after all to be human is better, and greater, and more beautiful than anything else.”

Reading and Research Redux: The Somerville Novelists Project

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

I admit, my earlier question “When is reading research?” was a bit disingenuous: obviously, research is purposeful reading. Of course, this definition can get batted around a bit too, depending on how you define your purpose: the pursuit of pleasure? aesthetic enrichment? familiarity with current best-sellers? Perhaps it’s better to say that, at least in a university context, research is reading in pursuit of knowledge, or reading directed towards solving a problem or answering a question or accomplishing a task. As Jo VanEvery also points out in her recent post on this topic, though, we have become preoccupied with the results of that reading, so that oddly, the process of exploration fundamental to defining a question in the first place has become devalued. And in universities we have also become preoccupied with research funding as a measure of productivity and success. If you don’t have a grant, you aren’t doing it right. Here, for instance, (with specifics expunged) is what the Assistant Dean of Research for my Faculty reported at the last Faculty meeting:

X has been awarded a —- Grant; X and Y have received a —- Grant for a conference… —- Grant applications this year are numerous and promising; X’s project on Y received a very positive mid-term review [from its funding agency].

At a recent presentation from one of our VP’s for research, at which he tracked our “success” and goals exclusively in terms of granting dollars, he made the point that money is measurable and thus is the easiest aspect of research to track and evaluate. The same is true, of course, of publications. But (as I and others pointed out to him emphatically in the Q&A that followed) that’s only true if the rubric you want to use is a pie chart or bar graph. If you really understand (as he claimed to) that research funding does not tell the whole story about research productivity, much less about the value of any given research project (especially in the arts and humanities), why continue using such inadequate tools? Perhaps there are fields of research in which research is better explained in a narrative, rather than a PowerPoint slide. Would it be too much, I wonder, to try to change our habits so that we acknowledge other dimensions of research activity–and stopped sending the incessant message that the best research is the most expensive? What about research that culminates in new classes, also? Isn’t that work valuable to the university? Isn’t that a purpose to which universities are fundamentally committed? You wouldn’t think so, by the way the term “research” is typically used on campus.

In any case, I can tell when my own reading has crossed into research of that more recognizable kind because I start to think about it in terms of obligations–things I should look up, things I need to know in order to achieve my purpose. I start to think in terms of depth and definition: more about this and this and this, but not that. Still, it’s always hard to draw the lines: there are no external rules about relevance, so you have to keep reading somewhat open-endedly as you figure out just how it is that you are going to define your project. There’s not a question “out there” waiting for me to turn my attention (and my students’ attention) to it: I have to mess around in all kinds of material until I see what I could do with it that is interesting and new. This conceptual work is, for me, among the most interesting and creative phase: there’s the whole “tempting range of relevancies called the universe,” and then there’s your part of it, but where that begins and ends, and why, is something that, in literary research at least, is rarely self-evident.

I’m in that happy stage right now with my Somerville novelists reading. I have defined a purpose for it–my fall seminar–and the reading I had been doing out of personal interest, which had included all of Brittain’s Testament volumes as well as the volume of Brittain and Holtby’s journalism, some of their fiction (as well as Margaret Kennedy’s), and some biographical materials, is now the first phase of a more deliberate investigation. I think this phase is happy for me because it involves focus but not the kind of micro-specialization that would be required to say or do anything research-like on Middlemarch now. Instead of having to read abstruse ruminations on theoretical or other kinds of topics that have less and less to do with the things that excite me about Middlemarch, reading I would be doing only out of a weary sense of professional duty (must keep up with the latest!), I’m doing reading I’m genuinely interested in–maybe because this material has simply not attracted the degree of scholarly attention Middlemarch has, it’s still possible to talk about it quite directly and with a real sense of discovery.

Here are some of the books I’ve collected so far for this research:

Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends. Ed. Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge (I’ll be posting a bit about this soon, as I’m over half way through – the stories are familiar from Testament of Youth but the letters in full have a remarkable immediacy and personality)

Winifred Holtby, Women and A Changing Civilization (I have a sad feeling that this 1934 book may have more relevance today than we’d like – “Wherever a civilisation deliberately courts its old memories, its secret fears and revulsions and unacknowledged magic, it destroys that candour of co-operation upon which real equality only can be based,” Holtby observes near the end – and flipping another page, I find “we must have effective and accessible knowledge of birth control.” Yes, I thought we’d had some of these fights before!)

Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford

Vera Brittain, Lady into Woman: A History of Women from Victoria to Elizabeth II (I’m curious to see what this reads like in comparison to the many volumes of women’s historical biography I worked with for my Ph.D. thesis, later my book)

Susan Leonardi, Dangerous By Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (as far as I know, this is the only critical work specifically dedicated to my seminar topic, and so far it is my main source for other relevant titles)

Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars. (This collection includes an essay Lynne Layton specifically on “Vera Brittain’s Testament(s)” as well as some useful-looking contextual ones.)

Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman.

This list shows the some of the frameworks that I expect will be important to talking about the core readings for the seminar in a rich and informed way: the stories of the writers; their works (our “primary” sources); the history of women at Oxford and in WWI (which means making sure I am reasonably well-prepared about general contexts); and theories and contexts on women and education, particularly university education. Each of the writers we’ll look at in detail will also raise more particular questions: with Sayers, for instance, the history of detective fiction will be of some relevance.

Doesn’t this sound like fun? That I’m excited about it makes me think it isn’t really research after all: research is work, right? Reading for pleasure isn’t work. And yet it can be, of course, and that’s the ideal of this kind of career–that it lets you do what you love, as well as you can, to make your living. That love itself can’t be the sole purpose of your reading makes sense in a professional context, but I’ve read an awful lot of scholarly writing that seems motivated by nothing more than the need to make certain moves in order to pass professional hurdles. In a previous post I quoted C. Q. Drummond saying “policies of forced publication never brought into being–nor could ever have brought into being–those critical books that have been to me most valuable.” Too much of the apparatus and discourse of research in the university seems to me to emphasize and reward everything but love of learning: it favors, as I said in that earlier post, “a narrow model of  output, a cloistered, specialized, self-referential kind of publishing supported, ideally, by as large an external grant as possible.” This project so far has been supported only by me, with some help from my university library. So it won’t ever get me mentioned in the Assistant Dean’s report (just as my publications in Open Letters had no place, literally, at the display of recent books and articles put on in my Faculty)–especially if its only output is a class, not an academic article or book. I haven’t ruled out that kind of result down the road, but I haven’t defined it as a plan yet either. In the meantime, I’m going to keep calling what I’m doing “research.”

Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

It wasn’t until I was nearly finished this outrageous and pitch-perfect satire that I realized it wasn’t really very funny. In fact (with apologies to Ford Madox Ford) I think I would even call it one of the saddest stories I’ve ever read. It’s sad partly because of the unforgiving picture it paints of contemporary American society, where everything’s for sale if you can only find the right pitch and the right market, where people only pay lip-service to ideals of equity and diversity but long for ways to subvert the pressure for genuine improvement, where women can make more by selling themselves than by doing their jobs. DeWitt has a particularly ruthless eye for banality–thinking about my surprise that this novel is by the author of The Last Samurai, it occurred to me that The Last Samurai is founded on a similarly harsh critique of people’s appetite for cheap substitutes. There it’s the “blunt attack on popular taste” exemplified by Sybilla’s insistence that Ludo realize what’s wrong with her samples of it (including a Liberace tape and a drawing by Lord Leighton). She tells him, “You will not be ready to know your father until you can see what’s wrong with these things”:

Even when you see what’s wrong you won’t really be ready. You should not know your father when you have learnt to despise the people who have made these things. Perhaps it would be all right when you have learnt to pity them, or if there is some state of grace beyond pity when you have reached that state.

The satire, the humour, of Lightning Rods (and it is often very funny, laugh-out-loud funny) seems to me to be driven by a similar feeling of utter contempt, though in this case for a different category: not for aesthetic mediocrities but for people who will believe any story that makes them accept what they already want, or helps them do what they’ve decided they need to do even if they know it’s wrong or unacceptable, or who allow a slapdash superficial glossy marketing version of morality to override their better instincts. Lightning Rods is sad because it’s right to hate that substitution of fake for real, and because there’s a lot of that going around these days.

But that’s not the sadness in the novel that really touched me. The biggest loss I was feeling, moving mentally from The Last Samurai to Lightning Rods, was the loss of the tremendous compassion that compensated there for Sybilla’s anger and disdain. If The Last Samurai were Sybilla’s novel only, it would have impressed me but I could not have loved it. Sybilla needs the redemptive companionship (in her life and in the novel) of Ludo. It’s too hard to go forward–and Sybilla is conspicuously failing to do that–stuck in an attitude of contemptuous superiority. It’s too close to despair and too alienating. You need a glimpse of some other possibility, and you need some forgiveness. Sybilla acknowledges that when she talks about the “state of grace beyond pity.” She knows it’s possible; she even feels it herself after Yamamoto’s concert. For most of Lightning Rods, I could not find any such compensation, any way out of the relentless forward march of Joe’s absurd but perfectly logical (and perfectly rationalized) success story. DeWitt is just so good: there are no cracks in the tone or point of view of the novel. That it’s a tone and point of view that we can be certain are anathema to DeWitt (it’s satire, after all) makes it all the more impressive that she can be so utterly convincing. (That’s also the great risk she takes: 273 pages in the vocabulary of spin and sales pitches and self-justification is a lot of pages. “The way I look at it is,” a characteristic passage begins..and then it follows, sentence after pitiless sentence, propelling us towards assent to the lowest estimates of what people are capable of, what they work for, what they are worth, what their aspirations should be. “The fact is”–and we’re off again.

The fact is there is no perfect job. The perfect job does not exist. People are people. Any job you go to, you’re always going to find people. And the way I look at it is, let’s say somebody steps out of line. You’ve got to keep a sense of proportion about these things.

There’s all that–and almost everybody in the novel is equally adept at it–and there’s Joe’s salesman rhetoric [“It’s important to give that new job 101%, 25 hours a day, 366 days a year. You simply can’t afford to have any distractions.]” Who really wants to spend 273 pages in this company, listening to these voices? It’s riskier, in a way, than something like “A Modest Proposal” because it is so banal. Swift’s excesses are wild, fun, dangerous–instead of boiled children, DeWitt gives us PVC tights and adjustable toilets.)

But back to the sadness. The polish of the novel is so impeccable, the premise so absurd, and the situations presented with such perfect deadpan comedy, that I couldn’t help but appreciate it, but I really wasn’t liking it at all. Then there came a little scene near the end where Joe is taken back, suddenly, to his first sales job, selling (or at least trying to sell) copies of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and the difference between what he could be selling and what he is selling confronts him and the tone of resolute optimism dies away, just for a page or so. Joe has made his fortune by accepting people “the way they are. Not how they ought to be.” This realism has made him a rich, successful man. But it’s not realism: it’s defeatism. Joe failed selling encyclopedias because “people could not make a living out of appealing to people’s better nature.” That would have been his first choice: to live in a world where that was possible, where people wanted encyclopedias rather than routinized anonymous sex (or the money it could earn them). “We live in the kind of world where people end up with their third or fourth or fifth choice because there just isn’t the money in their first choice”;

Every once in a while you get this glimpse of what the world would be like, not if everyone was perfect, but if just a few more people were just a little bit better than they are. You get this glimpse of a world where people could get by, maybe not with their first choice, but with a close second.

Joe sets to work talking himself out of the gloom this vision casts over him: “You’re making a living out of a world you didn’t make, out of people who evolved the way they happen to evolve. All you can ever do is try to increase the net sum of human happiness to the best of your ability.” It’s sad that his pep talk succeeds. It’s sad that his epiphany leads him, not to a brilliant new strategy for selling the Encyclopedia Brittanica, but to a brilliant new strategy for expanding his business into Christian ‘family values’ territory. It’s sad that this strategy works. But it’s saddest of all that he knows that what will sell is not what appeals to our better nature. There’s compassion here after all, for Joe’s knowledge (well hidden under his patter) that what he’s selling isn’t worth buying. The annoying, tireless, slick veneer of the novel is like the $1000 suit he buys to help him launch Lightning Rods: it’s an impeccably tailored garment covering up human failure, even tragedy. There’s a glimmer of that “grace beyond pity” in DeWitt’s treatment of Joe, it turns out.  But is there any of it for us? How can we judge Joe if he’s only selling what we’ll buy, after all?

This Week in My Classes: Middlemarch Everwhere!

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After all that concentrated activity in February, I found myself quite out of energy at the end of last week. I deliberately took it fairly easy over the weekend, to help myself recharge, and it was nice to putter. I did some reading–my book club is discussing Tender is the Night on Saturday, so I worked on getting into that (I’m not loving it–the self-absorbed and over-emotional characters are having something of the same effect on me as the crew in The Good Soldier–I think I’ll try to steer us in some new direction for our next read), and I had a nice trip to the public library with Maddie where I picked up Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods from the ‘new fiction’ display (I’m already nearly finished reading it, as it moves along quite fast, and I have really no idea at this point what to say about it except that if it weren’t by the author of The Last Samurai I never would have tried it). I finished the King Tut jigsaw puzzle we got for Christmas, I played MarioKart and Life with the kids…and I read Books III and IV of Middlemarch and organized lecture notes for today’s classes.

Yes, that’s right: reading Middlemarch was preparation for both classes! This week and next it’s Middlemarch everywhere! This is partly great, because the more time on Middlemarch the better, and it’s convenient to have my class reading do double duty. It is also partly difficult, because the classes have different purposes, so I can’t just use the exact same materials for both of them even if I wanted to–which I don’t anyway. There has to be some overlap, because after all, it’s the same book, and one little challenge is remembering what I’ve said to which group. But I’ve been thinking that this time around especially, because there are quite a few students who are in both classes, I should really try to address some different issues in the 19th-century fiction class than I do in Close Reading.

In Close Reading I’m spending a lot of time on the structure of the novel. In Friday’s tutorial and again today we worked on chronology, looking at episodes in which there is significant backtracking or circling around to return us to the same moment in time from a different point of view. I asked the students to look especially closely at Chapters XIX-XXII and then at Chapters XXVII-XXIX. Not only do these chapters include some of the novel’s greatest passages (the squirrel’s heartbeat passage, for one, and the equivalent centers of self, and the pier glass passage, and then ‘But why always Dorothea?’) but they are beautiful examples of that chronological manipulation. The main point I try to get across is that Eliot is dealing artistically with the problem Carlyle identifies in his essay on history: “narrative is linear but action is solid.” How do you deal with simultaneity, especially if you are committed (for moral as well as artistic reasons) to showing things (objects, people, events, histories) from different points of view? Chapter XXII, which deals mostly with the developing romance between Lydgate and Rosamond, ends with Sir James Chettam’s servant meeting Lydgate and Rosamond on the road (they are out for a walk) and summoning Lydgate to Lowick. The next two chapters take us back in time and bring us up to this same moment as it occurs in Dorothea and Casaubon’s story. To Lydgate and Rosamond, the servant’s arrival is a positive sign of Lydgate’s advancing career (which, for Rosamond, is also welcome confirmation that Lydgate is just the man she imagines him to be and will play just the role she wants in her fantasy). To Dorothea, Casaubon’s attack is key to her developing pity for him, and to redefining her married life in terms that have little to do with fulfilling her own aspirations. To Casaubon, his illness is a painful reminder of his mortality–and thus we end up, later on, with Chapter 42, my favorite in the whole novel.

We’re spending a lot of time on technical things in Close Reading–we’ve talked about point of view, narration, theme, plot, characterization, allusion, and figurative language as important parts of the craft of the novel. Of course I want to address some of these same things in 19th-Century Fiction (you can hardly read, much less teach, Middlemarch without addressing point of view, for instance!) but I’ve been thinking that my usual approaches tend to shortchange stories outside the Dorothea-Casaubon-Will and Rosamond-Lydgate axes. Fred and Mary don’t get nearly the attention they deserve, and neither does Bulstrode, or Farebrother. I’d also like to spend time on the novel’s political contexts and Mr Brooke’s run for Parliament, which I probably won’t have time for in Close Reading. There’s never enough time to talk about everything! It would probably be good for me, too, to back off a bit and see what the class wants to talk about. I’ll try. It’s hard, when my own enthusiasm is high and also when the challenge for them of just doing the reading seems pretty great. I scheduled four weeks for the novel in Close Reading, so we aren’t exactly rushing; we have almost but not quite that much time for it in 19th-Century Fiction. All of this planning may be up-ended, mind you, as the Dalhousie Faculty Association is currently in a strike position as of Saturday, and conciliation does not seem to be going well. But as I told my students, whatever happens you’ll be doing some kind of assignment on Middlemarch, and you can’t go wrong during any disruption of regularly-scheduled classes if you just keep reading…and reading.

Winifred Holtby, Anderby Wold

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Writing about Vera Brittain’s The Dark Tide, I suggested that “there are books that are bad in uninteresting ways and books that are bad and yet somehow still interesting.” I thought The Dark Tide was in the bad but interesting category. I think Anderby Wold may require me to add a third category: something like “books that are better than they seem” or “books that are interesting because of what they try to do, rather than what they actually do.” (That last description would fit The Dark Tide pretty well too, actually.) Anderby Wold seemed like a pretty awkward novel at first–artless, effortful. Its pieces are pretty clearly pieces: that is, I could feel them being assembled as I went along. But the overall construction of the novel turns out to be somehow shapely and even, by the end, engaging: once the pieces are assembled, Holtby knows what to do with them. The prose often has the quality I’ve been describing as a “flat affect” in Margaret Kennedy’s novels–but at times it rose into a more intense aesthetic and emotional register. It’s another book I don’t know quite what to say or do about, and that’s part of what I’m finding so interesting about my reading of these writers. How do you approach a novel in which this line seems perfectly normal: “Mary was turning linen sheets ‘sides to middles’ and arguing with David about the nationalization of land”?

Anderby Wold focuses on Mary Robson, a woman of 28 who seems much older: she has aged prematurely because of her dedication to maintaining her family farm. Along with the farm itself she inherited the mortgage on it which haunted her father’s conscience as well as his finances; when the novel opens she and her husband have just managed, after years of scrimping and struggling, to pay it off. Mary has sacrificed a lot to bring this about–even her marriage was made with an eye to practicalities, rather than to love. She isn’t altogether happy with her choices, but she does her best to drown out her doubts by inhabiting to the fullest degree possible the role of ‘lady of the manor’ for her rural community. It’s a sign of the changing times that her patronage makes many of the villagers uncomfortable, even resentful. Her identity and self-esteem are almost completely bound up, that is, in a way of life that is rapidly becoming outdated, and the novel’s central conflicts arise from her inability to concede defeat–but also from her restless wish that somehow she could be or do something different. Holtby embodies the alternatives in David Rossitur, an idealistic young reformer and agitator who, despite having met and become unlikely friends with Mary, urges the local farm workers to form a union and demand higher wages. Mary’s repressed emotions are awakened by David, who is everything her husband John isn’t. (In one sad but funny scene, she buys poor John a book — David’s, as it happens — about agricultural reform, reads it and gets all fired up herself, and waits impatiently for John to be roused from his habitual torpor to talk to her about it. “Well, John,” she finally asks, “what do you think of it? How far did you get?” “Page 121,” says John, and goes to bed. Probably every couple can find a template in this for some failed attempt at meaningful communication in their own marriage.) She doesn’t agree at all with David’s politics and thinks he’s a fool about farming, but he is young and passionate and brings into her life all the excitement she has never had. Her feelings for him only make it more painful for her when he turns “her” villagers against her, and Holtby does a good job at evoking Mary’s complicated and inconsistent emotions as the strike arrives, literally, on her doorstep.

So it’s a novel about conflicts between an old way of life (which is shown to have its own kind of honor and integrity but also to be old-fashioned in not entirely good way), and new social and political forces that also are morally equivocal. David’s idealism is undermined by his naïveté, for instance, and also by the ease with which people with personal grudges find unionizing a useful method of payback–every cause can be coopted for selfish purposes, after all. Mary’s determination to stand up to the union is also as much about personal pride as it is about farming, and it’s also very much about her clinging to her own rationalization for the life she has lived. The confused eroticism of her relationship with David is yet another complication. If Holtby were Elizabeth Gaskell, we know how this would all turn out (well, something would have to be done about John, but he’s older than Mary and in fact does suffer a stroke towards the end of the novel, so that’s not so difficult). But she’s not, and vexed as Mary’s situation is–ambivalent as Mary is (when she admits it) about holding out for Anderby Wold to go on as it always has–it seems like Holtby is mostly mournful about the inexorable pressure of modernization. It’s an act of sabotage, ultimately, that forces Mary to give up Anderby Wold, but the violence seems tied to the way David’s activism consolidates class hostility in the village, as if without his interference people might have muddled along OK. On the other hand, it is a personal vendetta that motivates the attack, one caused by Mary’s exercise of her patronage, so maybe that’s the point: one way or another, her ways aren’t good anymore. That’s pretty much where Mary ends up, anyway thinking that all the problems that came upon her were “connected with things she had done or left undone,” pondering sadly the possibility that (as David has said to her) “Her work at Anderby might be the best thing of which she was capable, but it was a false good.” It’s a melancholy ending, whatever its thematic implications.

It’s not a bad novel. I think it’s a mediocre novel, qua novel. As I said, it’s pretty well constructed. Mary’s character seemed a bit insubstantial, maybe because I’m also reading Middlemarch right now and there’s nothing like the rich contextualization and analysis of character you get there. Holtby took pains to fill in a range of distinct peripheral characters (schoolmaster, vicar, difficult sister-in-law, loyal worker who will defend Mrs Robson to the death–and does so, in a perverse way). There’s a conflict that feels like it matters, though it also feels a bit too neat, as if the concept came first and the human drama was layered on top of it. Of course, that’s probably often the case with novels (I’m sure it was the case with Middlemarch!) but it shouldn’t feel as if that’s the case when you’re reading the novel, right? At that point, the art should prevail and make the ideas seem inevitable. What I really appreciated about Anderby Wold, though–the reason I’d rather read it than many slicker contemporary novels (*cough cough* The Marriage Plot *cough cough*)–is its sincerity. That’s the quality the novel radiates, and I respect it: Holtby was trying to understand, and to help us understand, forces at work in the world around her. She wanted her art to participate in problems she thought mattered. That’s not enough to make a good, much less a great, novel, but she has enough skill to make it a decent novel, and if you add in that it’s a thoughtful novel, that’s not too bad. Maybe that’s what it is: a novel that’s not too bad. And after all, it’s her first novel.

Open Letters Monthly: The Criticism Issue

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

The March issue of Open Letters Monthly went live this morning. It’s the journal’s 5th anniversary, and we’ve celebrated by paying tribute to some of the great critics of the last century–those who inspire, challenge, and provoke us as we try in our own ways to be the best critics we can be. The issue is a treasure trove of thoughtful analysis and personal reflection. Sam Sacks writes on Frank Kermode, the “wisest of secular clerics”; John Cotter covers Gore Vidal’s essays with authority; Steve Donoghue writes with feeling about the great Elizabeth Hardwick; Greg Waldmann recounts the inspirational effect of reading Edmund Wilson;  Jeff Eaton takes us back to Emerson; Maureen Thorson looks at Randall Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age; Nicholas Nardini takes on Lionel Trilling, “godfather of the liberal imagination”; Dan Green offers a reconsideration of Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere; Stephen Akey appreciates Anthony Lane’s Nobody’s Perfect; and I face my fear and write for the first time about Virginia Woolf, in an essay on her Common Reader volumes. Also in the issue is our monthly poem and our regular mystery column, this time a retrospective on the life and work of Dame Agatha Christie. Every month we put out the very best critical writing we can, but this month’s focus on the critics we admire most seems to have motivated us to work even harder than usual. We’re very excited about the issue, and proud of all the work we’ve done–for five years now. I’ve only been on the masthead for a couple of those years, but I couldn’t be happier and prouder today to be a part of Open Letters.

Ahdaf Soueif, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Everything about Cairo: My City, Our Revolution shows that it was a book Ahdaf Soueif felt compelled to write. Partly a chronicle of the 18 days in 2011 that changed the course of modern Egyptian history, partly a memoir of Soueif’s life in and love for Cairo, the book is emotional, affecting, polemical, and necessarily imperfect–because, as Soeuif is very aware, the story it tells wasn’t over when she wrote it and (as she often remarks) will have developed even further by the time it reaches its readers.

So why write it and publish it now, instead of waiting until we know more about what came after those 18 days? One obvious response would that it will almost certainly be years, not months, before we’ll know how things turn out–as if, of course, there ever can be a definitive or complete story of any event. Defining beginnings and endings is always to some extent arbitrary. What Soueif has done, then, is not to offer (and not to pretend to offer) a ‘history’ of the Revolution, but to give an account of a specific moment that actually, by historiographical standards, does have remarkably clear boundaries. On January 25, 2011, protesters marched to Tahrir Square demanding the fall of the Mubarak regime; on February 11, 2011, Mubarak stepped down. From the distance of one year, perhaps that has come to seem like not much, like  not enough; the regime fell but what has replaced it? On February 11, 2011, though, Mubarak’s resignation was more than most had ever imagined. It wasn’t (isn’t) everything, but without it, there could have been nothing further. So there’s an intrinsic rationale to telling that story, to giving us one insider’s view, one participant’s experience.

Viewed as this kind of immediate record, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution is both gripping and inspiring. Soueif’s descriptions of the atmosphere inside Tahrir are especially moving: ringed around with tanks, beleaguered by agents of the regime every imaginable way, within Tahrir it’s another world:

Even the light in here is different, the feel of the air. It’s a cleaner world. Everything’s sharper, you can see the leaves on the trees. Badly lopped, they’re trying to grow out. Everyone is suddenly, miraculously, completely themselves. Everyone understands. We’re all very gentle with each other. As though we’re convalescing, dragged back from death’s very door. Our selves are in our hands, precious, newly recovered, perhaps fragile; we know we must be careful of our own and of each other’s.

The Midan is sparkling clean. The rubbish is piled neatly on the periphery with notices on it saying ‘NDP Headquarters.’ . . . Lamp posts have put out wires so that laptops and mobiles can be charged. The field hospitals provide free medical care and advice for everyone. A placard reading ‘Barber of the Revolution’ guides you to a free shave and a haircut. A giant transparent wall of plastic pockets has gone up. The shabab [youth] sit next to it. People tell them jokes and they draw or write them and slot them into the pockets; a rising tide of jokes and cartoons. A Punch and Judy show is surrounded by laughing families. A man eats fire. There’s face-painting and music and street theatre and a poetry stand.

The protestors watch Omar Sulaiman interviewed by Christiane Amanpour:

We watched the old torturer, stiff with formality and self-belief, clinging on to his simple conspiratorial concepts, holding himself rigid against the tide, his thumbscrews and cattle prods for the moment useless. When he says his message to us is: ‘Go home. We want to have a normal life,’ the streets answer with one voice: ‘Mesh hanemshi / Enta temshi!’ We’re not going / You go home!

And then, in the Midan, there was a wedding, and then more music and everywhere there are circles of people sitting on the ground talking, discussing; ideas flowing, from one group to another until the most popular find their way to one of the four microphones on the stages. I pause by one group and they immediately invite me to sit. People introduce themselves before they speak. Three civil servants, a teacher, a house painter, two women who work in retail. They talk about what brought them to Tahrir. In the end, the house painter says, it comes down to one thing: a person needs freedom.

Soueif’s enthusiasm for this utopian moment is infectious, as is her admiration for the young people who started it, fought for it, and in many cases died for it. She recalls a man “with his hand on his son’s shoulder” who says to her as they pass, “Yes, really. I thought so badly of him; sitting all day at his computer. Now look what he and his friends have done. Respect. Respect.” Her book is an eloquent tribute to these young men and women and to all the protestors who held their ground. It’s also a passionate reiteration of their idealism, of the hope for a free, open, compassionate world that Soueif found manifest in miniature in Tahrir during those 18 days. (Here’s an interview with Soueif from February 3, 2011, that captures the energy of that time. She’s wonderfully articulate, as usual.)

As a document about that moment in time, then, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution is compelling. A second rationale for the book, though, is that Soueif also explicitly considers it a contribution to the larger struggle begun on January 25, 2011 but nowhere near finished when the book went to press, and certainly not finished today either. Soueif’s account of the 18 days is offered in two parts that sandwich a third section called simply ‘An Interruption.’ Here, from the vantage point of October 2011, Soueif records and reflects on some of the events after the protestors left Tahrir: “On February 11 it seemed that we had emerged into a clear open space and that our progress would be swift. Now, eight months later, our landscape is more ambiguous, more confused.” Egypt has not been transformed: “SCAF have allowed no one to examine, punish, rehabilitate the security establishment, so the country is full of armed and disgruntled police and baltagis [enforcers], short of cash and ready to be used. The regime is still rich. And the old alliance between the regime and the security establishment is still in place.” The army that refused to fire on its own people now hinders the revolution at every turn; the generals rule nearly as despotically as Mubarak, and the result is “a story of escalating confrontation between the revolutionaries and SCAF.” Protests are violently broken up, people are beaten and jailed, different elements exert their influence–“I see the Saudi flag flying in Midan el-Tahrir.” The organic community of those 18 days has been dispersed.

But Soueif believes its energy has not been lost, and her book is an effort to sustain it and to spread its idealism and optimism.”Events in Egypt,” she concludes,

did not go in a beautiful straight line from our Tahrir days to a truly representative government implementing the empowerment of the people. So we’re still fighting. And this book is part of my fight, my attempt to hold our revolution ‘safe in my mind and my heart.’

She sees signs “across the planet” that people around the world understood and supported the Eygptian protesters because there is a common dream of freedom and dignity. She invokes as one example the Occupy movements, which achieved in their encampments similarly inspiring, fragile models of a world governed by something besides power and greed. She’s right that “as [we] read, [we] know a great deal more” than she can about what has become of those movements. She was right that “there are many bad possibilities.” Is she also right that “there are more good ones”? It’s not an easy time to be an idealist, but Soueif argues that “optimism is a duty”:

if people had not been optimistic on 25 January, and all the days that followed, they would not have left their homes or put their wonderful, strong, vulnerable human bodies on the streets. Our revolution would not have happened.

And so she closes with her most optimistic dream: that Cairo, the city she loves and has watched degraded and defaced and corroded, is now

the capital of an Egypt that’s come back to her people, that’s regained control of her land, her resources, and her destiny, and Egypt that is part of a world on its way to finding a better, more equitable, more sustainable way of life for its citizens,where people’s dreams and ambitions and inventiveness and imagination find an open horizon, and where variety and difference are recognized as assets in confident, vibrant, outward-looking communities.

This vision reminds me of her writing about the ‘Mezzaterra,’ which I think is central to her fiction as well as her political vision (I wrote about it in my essay on Soueif for Open Letters). Her insistence that optimism–belief in the possibility of a good outcome–is a moral duty is compelling. Nothing guarantees bad outcomes more surely than giving up on the hope of better ones, after all. There was a lot of that kind of negative thinking during the 18 days of the revolution, and I’ve heard and read plenty of people pointing to recent violence and trouble in Egypt as if it shows they were right to expect no great improvements. Against such defeatism, Soueif’s book is a great tonic. Perhaps inevitably, because I have thought so much about Soueif and George Eliot together, its underlying belief that we make things a bit better just by hoping for the best reminded me of Dorothea, who tells Will, “I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me”:

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil–widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

Soueif is deeply (understandably) troubled by her sense that Mubarak’s fall unleashed “the Forces of Darkness” encased and organized by his regime: “Now the casing’s been smashed and the Darkness is out there, unchannelled, panicked, rampant, twisting into every nook and cranny as it seeks to wrap around us again.” A book, however eloquent, may not be much, against such forces. But her hope is clearly that it will help keep the light of the Revolution bright and, indeed, make “the struggle with darkness narrower.” “This is about a better way of being in the world,” she says in the interview I’ve linked to above. That seems well worth hoping for.

 

This Week in My Classes: No Classes!

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That’s right, it’s February Break, or Reading Week, here at Dalhousie, and just in time too, because I have so much to do! By way of motivating me and helping me keep track, here’s my task list for the week. I’ll update it as things get done!

  1. Finish essay on Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader volumes for Open Letters Monthly (done!)
  2. Finish essay on blogging and academic practice for Journal of Victorian Culture (done!)
  3. Mark 30 short fiction annotation assignments for Close Reading (done)
  4. Read and give feedback on 63-page Ph.D. thesis chapter (done)
  5. Write two reference letters, both due March 1 (done)
  6. Prepare thoughtful reply to inquiry about blogging for someone else’s article about it (done)
  7. Finish reading The Woman in White and prepare concluding lecture for next Monday’s 19th-Century Fiction class (done)
  8. Keep reading Middlemarch and prepare lectures and activities for next week’s Close Reading classes, plus intro lecture for 19th-Century Fiction (done)
  9. Finish blog post on Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo: My City, Our Revolution
  10. Start series of blog posts on Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (my Balkan photos scanned)
  11. Submit book list to library for upcoming course on the ‘Somerville novelists’ (preliminary list underway)
  12. Brace myself for Fall 2012 book orders, which will come due April 1. (begun exploring options; publishers contacted for review copies)
  13. Mark 1 late poetry assignment for Close Reading (done)
  14. Edit incoming pieces for the 5th Anniversary Issue of Open Letters Monthly (I almost forgot that my own duties to this issue don’t begin and end with my own contribution!) (done!)

That list is sort of in order of priority, though I’m likely to intersperse lighter tasks like the Soueif blog post with harder ones like the thesis chapter and marking assignments. And the class prep for next week is here because I don’t want to wake up on Sunday and realize that in focusing on my special projects for this week, I let the routine business slip and end up in a panic. It’s a lot to do, but because this is also supposed to be a bit of a break, my aim is to work hard during the day and not work (or not work so much) at night the way I usually do. I have one more season of MI-5 to go on Netflix. An episode a night would be a nice treat–well, not so nice, since they keep killing off characters I’m fond of. But still, it’s a distraction.

February 28 Update: I didn’t get quite everything done during the actual break, but now it’s looking pretty good. The Rebecca West posts weren’t really a high priority anyway, but I am eager to get started on them and to keep reading the book. Not on this list is ‘Read Winifred Holtby’s Anderby Wold, which I have in fact been doing…so a post on that should follow before long. I think having this list posted publicly did prove motivating!

This Week in My Classes: Close Reading Middlemarch

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

You can’t really do it, of course, or not and finish the novel in a few short weeks. I’ve been rereading it for years and I know I still haven’t read it closely enough. Still, if you can slow down and really pay attention, I don’t know a book that’s more fun to try reading closely than Middlemarch–which is why I’ve been crazy enough to assign it in my Close Reading class.

We’re just starting up the novel this week, so on Monday I gave an introductory lecture on ‘The Interesting Life of Mary Ann Evans,’ part of my belief that humanizing the author will help give the students courage as they stare down what is one of the longest books they’ll probably be assigned during their degree. In that lecture I also lay out some general principles that are important to George Eliot’s philosophy of fiction in general and to Middlemarch in particular–ideas about realism and sympathy and morality. Though I worry a bit that starting with big abstractions will put students off the novel or make them approach it with something less than their usual enthusiasm for plot and character, I think it’s not a good idea to assume we can work inductively with such a big text. In this class especially, our work is on understanding and appreciating the literary techniques at work and how they support or convey such large-scale ideas. We will be able to talk better about what’s going on at the level of literary devices if I give them some shortcuts to themes and patterns.

On Wednesday, we worked on ways the novel teaches us how to read it. We talked about the title and subtitle, for instance, and how they let us know that we’re in kind of a middling community, marching along rather than wandering according to impulse (certainly not dancing!). We’re reading a “study of provincial life,” not, say, an exposé of the seamy underside of London: that sets up some expectations too, and it begins our education about the narrator, a learned observer, perhaps a scientist or philosopher, someone outside or above the action. That’s a good place to talk about what omniscient and intrusive narrators are good for: with other texts (such as Updike’s “A & P”) we had talked quite a bit about the advantages of first-person narration, but also about what a first-person narrator can’t usually do, such as provide historical background or critical perspective on himself. Exposition (or “telling”) sometimes gets a bad rap in contemporary talk about fiction, so it’s good to spend a little time on its  uses. One of the overall goals I have for the course is precisely this kind of attention to what different choices enable. In Middlemarch, one result of Eliot’s narrative strategies–not just her particular kind of narrator but also her attention to multiple points of view–is a lot of dramatic irony. We know a lot that the characters don’t know, or see things in ways they don’t. In the first chapters, we especially see more than, or differently from, Dorothea: we know that her marriage to Casaubon is a dreadful idea, and knowing that, we watch with shock and horror as she rushes ardently into it. But because we also get a lot of information from, and about, her point of view, we understand why she does it.

Today we had our first tutorial sessions on the novel. One of my goals was to get people started talking more about the novel, just to loosen everyone up. There’s a certain intimidation factor with such a big book, and we need to get past that and just start reading it and discussing it as soon as possible. But this is not a class on 19th-century fiction as such (in that class, we start Middlemarch next week, though, so yay, more!) but a class on close reading, so today I also wanted to help them see how and why to really pay attention. One of the most important stylistic features of the novel is precisely its constant shifting among different points of view, which happens at the level of individual sentences as well as paragraphs, chapters, and entire volumes. Eliot uses a lot of free indirect discourse, so some of the shifts are subtle. It can be fun but is also sometimes crucial to tease them out. If you aren’t paying attention to point of view, you might wrongly attribute observations or conclusions to the narrator, for instance (and thus take them to be the ‘position’ of the novel overall) that properly belong to specific individual characters or groups or communities.

Here’s one of the passages we read through today:

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

Much of that paragraph reflects the perspective of that “wary man”; it’s certainly not the narrator who thinks it’s “natural” to think twice about marrying unconventional women, or who sees it as the “great safeguard of society” that women not act on their weak opinions–or, if these are the narrator’s views, they are ironically inflected ones, as the rest of the novel might reveal. Unconventional people and ideas are, after all, disruptive.

Here’s another paragraph just a little bit further on:

She was open, ardent, and not in the least self- admiring; indeed, it was pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with attractions altogether superior to her own, and if any gentleman appeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that of seeing Mr. Brooke, she concluded that he must be in love with Celia: Sir James Chettam, for example, whom she constantly considered from Celia’s point of view, inwardly debating whether it would be good for Celia to accept him. That he should be regarded as a suitor to herself would have seemed to her a ridiculous irrelevance. Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said “Exactly” to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty, — how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.

Again, we start with the narrator, but if you miss the slide into free indirect discourse at the end, imagine what an odd idea of the narrator’s values you’d have! The more familiar we get with the characters as well as with the narrator, the more assured our attributions become (different characters speak very differently, as we’ll get to have some fun with in class when we do my “Look Who’s Talking in Middlemarch” handout (if you follow the link and do the quiz, let me know!).

The other topic for today’s tutorials was diction–a small word with big implications for Middlemarch. Our textbook introduced the concept of “semantic fields” in the section on poetic vocabulary, and I’ve been encouraging students to work with the same idea here, starting with the vocabulary associated with Dorothea and Mr. Casaubon. I gave them one direct hint (watch for uses of “ardent”) and we’ve already started running into “petty”: those two words define one of the novel’s central thematic conflicts, so if they start paying attention to them–to who uses them or where they apply–they will start to find that the initial impression the novel gives of information overload is offset by an awareness of patterns the information falls into. I hope.

You see, this is why I think Middlemarch is a good choice for a class on close reading: it just gets better the more closely you read it. It’s not a book for rushing through (though I do remember reading along breathlessly to the end on my first time with it!).