Commentary is probably redundant.
The Other Sides of Silence
I’ve begun trying to organize my ideas about In the Eye of the Sun. At this point I’m finding that the questions and confusions in my head about the novel’s relationship to Middlemarch are increasing rather settling into some kind of order. I’m hopeful, of course, that this mental chaos, while disconcerting this close to my conference deadline, is evidence of the interest and complexity of the interpretive project I’ve undertaken, as well as of the wider range of ideas I’ve brought to my latest re-reading of Soueif’s novel thanks to my excursions into postcolonial theory, modern Egyptian history, the story of Cairo University, and other materials directly by or about Ahdaf Soueif. I often reassure my thesis students that things inevitably get messy for a while, especially in the ‘discovery’ phase, when you are moving past the provisional hypotheses of your research proposal and actually looking at how the pieces you’ve assembled relate to each other and finding out the ‘unknown unknowns’ (a much-derided phrase I’ve always felt some sympathy for, despite its source, as one of the great challenges of research is precisely that you don’t always know what you don’t know until your work is well underway).
In any case, one thing I do know at this point is that time constraints–not just for the writing of the conference paper, but also for its presentation–mean I couldn’t address all the potential angles that have occurred to me even if I did sort them all out. So my main task in the next couple of days is setting the limits for this version of the paper, which I hope over the summer to develop into the fuller, more wide-ranging form envisaged in the proposal I submitted. I’m thinking right now of focusing quite specifically on the novel’s most overt gesture towards Middlemarch, which is its epigraph, taken from the famous ‘squirrel’s heartbeat’ passage in Chapter 20:
…and we do not expect people to be moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die on that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
There are a number of passages in In the Eye of the Sun which (on my reading, anyway) invoke a “roar … on the other side of silence,” but it is not easy to see just how they engage with this moment in Eliot’s novel–whether, for instance, they reflect, extend, or critique it. Here is one such passage, for example, from Part VI of Soueif’s novel. It is 1971 and the protagonist, Asya al-Ulama, is with her friends studying for their exam in 20th century poetry. One of the company is Bassam, a Palestinian; thinking about his experience of “living under occupation” leads Asya to a wider meditation on “all those bruised people: Palestinians, Armenians, Kurds, and of course the Jews themselves,” and then on “all the things that are happening right now … as they sit here studying for their poetry exam:”
secret deals being arranged in government departments, counterdeals in secret service meetings, ignorant armies moving silently by night,* people being thrown out of their houses, babies being tortured, people being tortured–this is the point where Asya’s mind starts to do a loop. People being tortured. Right now. As we sit here. Tortured. And what do we do? We go on studying for our exams. . . . But what else is to be done? What can be done? Can you get up right now and rush off to some prison — assuming you know where one is — and hammer at the door? … No. No, well, of course not, that’s stupid — and yet how can you just go on sitting here while someone somewhere is having live wires pushed up his rectum, his teeth pulled out of his head, her vagina stuffed with hungry rats, or having to watch her baby’s head being smashed against the —
Asya jumps up. She always jumps up when she gets to this bit. Now she goes out on the balcony and stands holding on to the stone balustrade and breathing fast and looking at the lights of the Officer’s Club. She daren’t look up at the sky because the darkness and the stars will make her think of how the earth is a tiny ball spinning round and round in space, and space is something she cannot even being to imagine.
When these panics come over her, Asya copes by trying not to think. It is easy to see not just the comfort but the necessity of being, as Eliot concludes even the best of us is, “well wadded with stupidity.”
Both passages turn on the possibility of being overwhelmed by too full an awareness of suffering in the world. But the specifics of that suffering seem very different. Dorothea is sad in Chapter XX because she has married the wrong man, because the “new real future which replaces the imaginary” for her is such a disappointment. The narrator acknowledges that her situation is commonplace and that to see it as a tragedy requires a recalibration of “tragic” to accommodate something so unexceptional. Much of the moral pressure of Middlemarch is precisely in this direction: towards extending our sympathies to those suffering through the petty trials of “ordinary human life.” The novel, we might say, encourages us to listen for the squirrel’s heartbeat, to risk casting off some of that protective padding (constituted largely of egotism), as Dorothea, in her sorrow, is just beginning to do:
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness that is no longer reflection but feeling — an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects — that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.**
On the other side of silence in Middlemarch, then, we have a vast accumulation of “equivalent centre[s] of self,” and the roar we hear (if, unlike Mr Brooke, we go “too far”) is a cacophony of personal feelings.
In contrast, in In the Eye of the Sun we hear “men from the Muslim Brotherhood [who have been] pumped up, blown full of water,” and then jumped on and exploded–screams of literal, physical (not metaphorical, moral, or spiritual) pain. Such acts are, indeed, unthinkable, and yet they are part of the everyday reality of Asya’s world: not of her everyday experience, of course, but part of the news she reads, the stories and rumours that circulate among her friends and family, the fears and motivations of people she knows. It is possible to find Dorothea’s “faintness of heart” at learning of Mr Casaubon’s deficiencies trivial by comparison to the sufferings enumerated in Asya’s versions of “Hamlet-like raving” about “all the trouble of all the people in the world” (Middlemarch Chapter 77)–and if In the Eye of the Sun were a different novel overall, I think this contrast might propel me towards a reading of it as critical of Middlemarch, taking the passage from Chapter XX as its epigraph in an ironic spirit (at best) and trying to show up the political inadequacy of its highly “self”-centered morality. I don’t think this is how the epigraph is in fact refracted through Soueif’s novel, though. My task for work tomorrow (if our ritual departmental “May Marks Meeting” allows) will be trying to explain why… I think it has something to do with the interplay of personal and political in both cases (both exemplify what Jerome Beatty calls “history by indirection”), and with the specific relationship of Dorothea and Asya to their husbands (within story space) and to the form of their novels.
(Trying to put even this much into something clear enough to post has been very helpful: I feel that I have, at least provisionally, cleaned up a little of the mess.)
*I just caught the echo of “Dover Beach” here, another tempting bit of intertextuality. That’s what I mean by things getting messier.
**Middlemarch is such a wonderful book.
Who Cares Who Killed … Whoever It Was?
I’ve just finished reading the latest releases by two of my favourite mystery novelists, P. D. James‘s The Private Patient and Elizabeth George‘s Careless in Red. (I know they’ve been out for a while; I was waiting for the paperback editions.) Both books are better than fine as examples of their type–though George is in fact American, both authors write what we could call highbrow British police procedurals, leisurely in pace, attentive to setting, driven by character more than plot. Both write well; James’s prose is more economical, while George’s would (IMHO) benefit from more stringent editing, but both offer their readers intelligent complexity of language and thought. The depth of character and theme both achieve justifies James’s repeated assertion that crime fiction provides a useful structure for the novelist without necessarily limiting the literary potential of her work.
Yet for all their virtues, I found myself unexpectedly dissatisfied with both of these novels, for reasons that are based in their form. Often in my course on mystery and detective fiction we talk about the limits working in this genre sets on certain literary elements, chief among them characterization. A mystery novelist can not afford to mine the depths of her characters as long as they are suspects in the case. This technical limitation is most apparent in writers of ‘puzzle mysteries,’ such as Agatha Christie, but even with writers who develop their people quite fully, as James and George do, an element of opacity is required, not just about their actions, but about their feelings and values, else we will know too quickly “whodunnit.” (There are exceptions, of course, as when some of the novel is openly from the point of view of the criminal, though often then we have inside knowledge without knowing the character’s outward identity.) The same limits do not, however, apply to the detectives–which is one reason, as historians and critics of the genre have pointed out, for the appeal of the mystery series. Across a series of novels, we can come to know the detectives very well, and a developmental arc much longer than that of any single case emerges. Though the case provides the occasion, after a while the real interest lies with the detective.
That, I think, is very much what has happened with both James’s Adam Dalgliesh and George’s Thomas Lynley. Every one of their books is populated by a new array of people, but they are the ones with whom we have longstanding relationships–remarkably longstanding, indeed, as James has been publishing Dalgliesh mysteries since Cover Her Face in 1962, and the first Lynley novel, A Great Deliverance, was published in 1988. And though Dalgliesh and Lynley have always been complex and interesting protagonists, in recent books so much of significance has happened in their lives that I turned to these latest instalments motivated far less by curiosity about the latest corpse than by the desire to know how things are going with them. While actually reading the books, I took a fairly perfunctory interest in the investigations but I was keenly interested in what came to seem the regrettably few sections focusing on, for instance, Dalgliesh’s relationship with Emma Lavenham (and not just because it’s a little victory for English professors everywhere). The real novelistic potential of The Private Patient emerges, I think, in the scene in which Emma confronts Dalgliesh in his professional capacity and we see, fleetingly, the difficulty that even these two extremely intelligent and independent people might have reconciling law and love, justice and humanity. But this material is not developed, and in fact the novel in which it does become the focus would have to leave the genre of detection quite far behind. (Gaudy Night is a rare example of a novel that I believe successfully balances human and literary interests with mystery elements, partly by integrating the case so thoroughly with the personal aspects of the story and making both the detection and the romance converge on the same themes.) Careless in Red spends more time on Lynley’s personal situation, but again his struggle to move forward after the tragedy of two novels ago (see how I’m avoiding spoilers, in case anyone hasn’t already read this excellent series?) is subordinated to the case at hand–though George does set the case up with thematic echoes of his tragedy.
I can hardly fault either author for the relative weight they give to the professional, rather than personal, business of their characters. That’s the kind of book they have undertaken to write. Also, as their protagonists are professional detectives, policing is integral not just to their work, but to their identities. But I do wonder if even James, the acknowledged Grande Dame of the genre, hasn’t finally shown us the end point (dare I say the dead end?) of a commitment to this genre. Just introducing the kind of story arcs they have given their protagonists recently suggests that James and George might be chafing at the constraints of detective fiction, wanting to write a straight novel of psychological and moral development, a novel in which incident is second to character, a novel squarely in the tradition James has always claimed as hers–that of Austen and George Eliot and Trollope. At any rate, that’s the kind of novel I find I wish they would write. Over the years they have succeeded in getting me quite emotionally involved in the lives of their main characters (and not just Dalgliesh and Lynley, either, but Kate Miskin, Barbara Havers, Simon and Deborah St. James…). The corpse and suspects, however, are never more than passing acquaintances.
On a somewhat tangential note, I was struck reading The Private Patient by the elegaic note on which it ends, in a passage which also echoes the wonderful ‘squirrel’s heartbeat’ passage from Chapter XX of Middlemarch:
She thought, The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all the earth’s living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defense against the horrors of the world but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all we have.
Though of course I would not rush to assume that a character’s views are those of the author, it is hard not to read this final paragraph from a novelist who has spent nearly five decades telling us about “deeds of horror” as a reminder, even a consolation, that even in a murder mystery, death need not define life.
Cry Me a River
I’ve been thinking about the movies that make me cry. OK, it could be a long list, as I’m the sort who likes to live vicariously through the plots of whatever she watches (what’s the point of watching if you are still aware you are sitting in your living room? it’s all about escape, right?). It amazes me how some moments never lose their poignancy for me. Yesterday, for instance, my daughter and I were watching West Side Story. I never make it much past the mock wedding, even though neither the (synched) singing nor the acting is altogether convincing:
The gorgeous Kiri / Jose version of “One Hand, One Heart” shows off the score better, but to me there’s something about Natalie Wood’s wide-eyed innocent beauty that I find heart-wrenching every time.
The ravishing Zeffirelli feature film of La Traviata is another one. I tear up about starting about here…
…and don’t recover until the end. The first time I saw it in the theatre, I could barely stand up when it was over. (Of course, Joan Sutherland is the only one who could really sing the whole part.)
Also on my list: Melanie’s death in Gone with the Wind, Beth’s death in any version of Little Women, most of the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet (I gather purists don’t love this version, but once again I’m a sucker for youth and beauty), and the last hour of Wit, in which the visiting mentor’s gentle reading of The Runaway Bunny should undo even most cool and detached observer.
I think the ability to cry at movies may be a prerequisite for becoming a Victorianist, actually. We all know Oscar Wilde’s sneer that it would take a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing. Well, I cry when Jo dies in Bleak House, and there are parts of In Memoriam that I slip past in class because I don’t want to risk reading them aloud. (I also wept my way through the final chapters of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and, more recently, A Thousand Splendid Suns.)
OK, ‘fess up: I can’t be the only sentimental fool out there. What movies (or books, if you prefer) always make you cry?
Summer Reading Plans?
Even in Halifax, spring comes eventually, so I’ve been thinking about my reading plans for the summer. One result is that over at The Valve I have raised the possibility of another group reading, organized along the lines of last year’s Adam Bede event. The novel I have proposed is Charlotte Bronte’s Villette; I give a few more details and ask some questions about procedure in my post at The Valve. If you’re interested,or have any response to my questions about format, let me know, here or at The Valve.
Why Books?
This post from Sisyphus is timely for me, as I had a meeting recently with a representative from a university press to discuss what kind of monograph might lurk beyond the discrete research and writing projects I have been engaged in lately, and as a result I have been thinking a lot myself about the shape, purpose, and necessity (or not) of academic books. Sisyphus asks,
why is the “gold standard” in literary studies a book for tenure if we are not assigning them in our classes?
I hadn’t thought about monographs in our discipline from quite that angle before, but it’s true that, consistent with what Sisyphus says about other disciplines, I remember being assigned quite a lot of scholarly books to read in their entirety when I was a history student, and doing assignments that were essentially a kind of book report or review. But it would never occur to me to assign more than a fraction of a scholarly book in one of my own undergraduate classes, or, for that matter, in my graduate classes. If I assign anything besides a stand-alone article, it is most likely to be the framing chapter(s) from a book, where the main theoretical or interpretive argument will be laid out, sometimes along with a chapter directly addressing an assigned primary text.
I’m not sure, though, how to connect these observations (keeping in mind, of course, that my practices in this respect may be anomalous) with what we ought to value when it comes time to assess tenure files. Our classroom work typically bears little overt relation to our published work, doesn’t it? Also, as the students doing Sisyphus’s library assignment discovered, however dynamic and engaging we are when we teach, in our books and articles our “academic voice” becomes “difficult, contentious, and completely boring”! That may be one reason why, as has been pointed out in a couple of places recently, even academics hardly read other academics any more.
Another likely cause of our own relative failure to ‘keep up’ with each others’ output, as well as our reluctance (assuming this is a general phenomenon) to assign entire books along with–or, as every syllabus is a zero-sum game–instead of primary texts, may be the massive proliferation, and overwhelming micro-specialization, of academic monographs. No matter how narrowly I define my own research interests, it is physically impossible for me to read all the relevant available material, and as my interests in fact range across periods and disciplines, the labour of choice rapidly becomes overwhelming in itself. Inevitably, it seems to me, the excessive supply degrades the value of any particular book; it becomes hard to justify singling out one (or two, or even three) monographs that really demand and deserve such special notice and extended engagement. This is not to assume that any given monograph is not in fact, on its own terms, valuable, but here’s a not entirely hypothetical case: I’m teaching a graduate seminar next winter on George Eliot. Which entire academic book would you assign in its entirety? My instinct is that the best candidate would be an older book–a critical ‘classic’–because you’d want its range and applicability to be as broad as possible: Barbary Hardy’s The Novels of George Eliot, for instance, or Dorothea Barrett’s Vocation and Desire: George Eliot’s Heroines. Books published since about 1990 get increasingly specific in their interests–George Eliot and science, or historiography, or empire, or Italy, or music–and thus decreasingly useful in a more general context such as my seminar (though, of course, they would be invaluable to students pursuing presentations or papers on related narrower topics).
The overwhelming number of highly specialized academic monographs was one of the things I wanted to talk to this university press acquisitions editor about. It’s hard not to feel at times as if we should all just stop and ask ourselves what we are doing and why, and whether doing it in book-length manuscripts that may eventually be seen into print only to languish, expensive but unread, on library shelves should really be our goal. The MLA argues for decentering the monograph as “the gold standard” for tenure and promotion, but largely on practical grounds: publishing books is only going to get harder, for reasons that have little to do with the quality of their content. (It may have something to do with the nature of that content, of course, as the intense specialization typical of an academic book guarantees a small market.) If we could do that, though–if we could remove the expectation that junior scholars need to “have a book” to get tenured, not only could we release them from the vice but also liberate ourselves from the book glut. Because let’s face it: how many monographs published in the last two decades are book-length because their arguments “need to be thought through on this level of scope and depth across a lot of pages,” as Sisyphus sums up the usual pro-book argument, and how many for more careerist reasons? The standard model is a theoretical, contextual, or critical framing (the book’s selling point) and then a series of chapters “reading” particular texts from that angle or through that lens. (That’s exactly how my own monograph is structured.) That’s not a terrible way to build a book, but almost inevitably the “readings” chapters lack urgency: they are illustrative, rather than integral or developmental. They show the main idea in practice, and they demonstrate how or why it is an interesting or useful or important idea. But they’re arbitrary, rather than necessary, and they might do just as well as supplementary articles. They might even have more portability and usefulness in article form because they would need their own framing material, perhaps a refined version of the book’s larger argument, and so would work well as assigned readings, whereas in chapter form their specific claims may not be entirely cogent without the explanation offered in the book’s introductory chapters. (Now that I think of it, I do often assign articles that have eventually appeared as book chapters, but I use the stand-alone version, for more or less that reason.)
Lightening up on the book expectation would also remove the corrupting pressure to inflate, not only our prose and our manuscripts, but our claims. Book-length treatments of subjects do require justification, after all: the claim needs to be made that here is something really worthy of time, attention, space, and resources. So we make relatively grandiose claims about the innovation and importance of our work. It’s no use having insight into a particular author or text: you need to propose a revision of a major critical paradigm, or a reconfiguration of traditional literary histories, or a radical new understanding of the importance of some side-angle in a particular writer’s corpus (pickles, anyone?), or otherwise attach what may be a genuine but modest claim to something as big as you dare. You need to make it sound “interesting,” even if that means knowing your reach will exceed your grasp.
The editor I spoke with was firm about the commitment of his press to specialized academic monographs, and we should all be grateful that there are publishers who recognize that some subjects do need to be treated, some arguments made, in long form, and that their value is not defined by the size of the audience they will reach but by their contribution to knowledge and understanding. We’ve all probably been delighted, too, to discover on the shelves hitherto unknown books, maybe books we are the first to sign out, that illuminate a topic about which we have suddenly discovered we want or need to know more. But something’s wrong when “a book” as such is the goal. Shouldn’t we work on a smaller scale until we discover we really can’t explain ourselves without a larger canvas? Shouldn’t a book be a capstone achievement, as it once was, rather than an obligatory and thus often perfunctory professional performance? If enough people keep asking these questions, maybe we can “be the change.”
Workload Comparisons
I’ve been grading exams. I have 65 of them. I also have a stack of 21 essays in progress. As these are not the only things I am trying to get done, occasionally I feel a bit overwhelmed. However, here’s some information to keep my workload in perspective:
It has been estimated that in the Faculty of Letters in Cairo 180,000 examination papers have to be marked by 100 teachers.*
*Derek Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society 1945-90 (Harper Collins, 1991).
An Unfamiliar Sensation; and, More on Post-Colonial Criticism
I think it’s called a “lull.”
I’ve just crossed off the last teaching-related task that I can do for now. This afternoon my Mystery and Detective Fiction students are writing their final exam and my Victorian Faith and Doubt papers are due at 4:00. Until these milestones are passed, however, I am free. Free, that is, to work on other things, like my Soueif paper! But a change is as good as a rest, no?
So, about that paper. In between my other recent activities, I’ve been thinking more about post-colonial criticism and why I’ve been assuming that it is a necessary component of this project. Some time ago I asked “whether working on Egyptian novelist writing in a post-colonial context necessitates using post-colonial theory.” The always-helpful Aaron Bady responded that a more productive version of my question might be “how to determine to what extent the meaning of Eliot in Egypt is determined not merely by Eliot herself, but by the meaning of ‘English literature’ in Egypt.” Now that I’ve looked at least a bit more closely at what it means to “use” post-colonial theory (or, properly, to do “post-colonial readings”) I think I understand better the difference between these options. If (though I realize now that this is debatable) a “post-colonial reading” means reading with a specific focus on how the text under consideration is “implicated” in imperialism, then that is not the right angle from which to approach a text like In the Eye of the Sun, which is itself (perhaps) a post-colonial text. If a post-colonial reading is called for in this project, it would presumably be a reading of Middlemarch, in order to see how (or whether) Soueif’s engagement with that novel is an engagement with it on those terms. My own preliminary sense of In the Eye of the Sun is that this is not what it is doing with Middlemarch–but I can’t be sure unless I can grasp what a post-colonial interpretation of Middlemarch might entail, so there is a reason to continue my exploration of this theoretical approach. Priority reading, then: Nancy Henry’s George Eliot and the British Empire and Patrick Brantlinger’s new volume Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies. I’ve spent some time with Henry’s book before and recall it focusing primarily on Daniel Deronda. So far I’m not aware of any specifcially post-colonial reading of Middlemarch.
Returning to Aaron’s reformulated question, though, about the meaning of ‘English literature’ in Egypt, this turns out to be quite an interesting question to think about, and not an easy one to answer. A slight refinement of it might be, what does English literature in general, and Middlemarch in particular, mean to Soueif–or, what does English literature in general, and Middlemarch in particular, mean in In the Eye of the Sun? What does it mean for an Egyptian novelist to invoke this novel as a touchstone in a novel about an Egyptian woman studying English literature in Egypt and then in England? What interpretive freight does Middlemarch carry here? There is a textual dimension to these questions (what is actually said about literature, for instance, or about Middlemarch). But there’s a contextual dimension too, such as the conditions by which English becomes a subject of study in Egyptian universities in the first place, so that Soueif herself, as well as her character Asya, has anything to do with Middlemarch at all. Here too, colonialism is clearly a factor. So far, I haven’t found much scholarship addressing the history of English studies in Egypt; more attention has gone to English studies in India, such as Guari Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest, which emphasizes the role of literary studies in “strengthen[ing] Western hegemony” and imperial control. I was prompted by Amardeep Singh’s extremely clear and helpful comments here to order Priya Joshi’s In Another Country (on sale now at Columbia UP, in case you are interested), but I think there too the focus is on India. I’ve found one book on the history of Cairo University, Donald Reid’s Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt, which gives some useful insights into the competing imperial impulses and nationalisms that shaped the formation of that institution. English studies get fairly brief mention, though what is there is certainly interesting. For instance, did you know that Robert Graves taught at what was then the Egyptian University for a while, or that Jehan Sadat’s PhD thesis was on “the influence of nineteenth-century English romanticism on twentieth-century Egyptian writing” (219)? Reid’s explanations of the Egyptian educational system more generally, as well as his account of the “Islamist challenges” of the 1970s and 1980s, certainly help place Asya’s experiences in the novel for me, especially her uncomfortable encounters with veiled students on her return to the university after her years abroad (I learned, for instance, that in 1981 Sadat imposed a ban on students wearing the niqab, a ban which was overturned in 1988). More specific analysis of the curriculum of English studies, or the value attached to it, or its ideological implications in a specifically Egyptian context I haven’t yet found. In fact, at this point it seems to me that English-Egyptian relations have received far less scholarly attention than English-Indian relations, at least in the areas where such scholarship would overlap with literary scholarship. I may learn otherwise as my research continues, but if I’m right about this, that in itself is kind of interesting. In the meantime, I can consider what has been said about English literature in India to see what insights there might seem portable to my own context. Again, I have a preliminary sense that In the Eye of the Sun is not setting English literature up as an antagonist or ‘problematizing’ English studies on political or nationalistic grounds, but everything I learn about how and why someone in Egypt would be reading Middlemarch is helfpul to my thinking. Though in exploring these issues I will be thinking about relationships between a former colonial power and a former colony, I don’t believe that probing these questions qualifies as doing “post-colonial criticism.”
One final thought about all of this: I really do think one of the reasons I have been worrying about post-colonial criticism even though it’s not clear to me that its concerns are my concerns, is anxiety about the expectation that Soueif’s novel is best understood as a post-colonial critique of Middlemarch–that I will get questions from the floor along those lines, for instance, and not know how to answer them. Even if those questions might represent a kind of unwarranted knee-jerk assumption about how Victorian novels always already function in a post-colonial context, there I’d be fumbling the question about Said or Homi Bhaba or whatever and my protestations that the question is a sort of category mistake would just make me look either ignorant or evasive. The work I’m doing right now may turn out to be largely irrelevant to the arguments I ultimately make about In the Eye of the Sun, but at least I will be better prepared to explain why I have done the project I have done, and not something else.
And now, off to invigilate my exam and (circumstances permitting) read Viswanathan.
This Week in My Classes (April 9, 2009)
This was our last week of classes for the term. Though it is a relief to be done with the insistent pressure to be ready for the next class meeting (an anxiety that kicks in for me about as soon as I walk out of the classroom), in its own way the next phase is also pretty tiring. For instance, I have about 25 papers left in my half of the batch from Mystery and Detective Fiction, and I hope to return them at the exam on Tuesday, which didn’t seem unrealistic until it really sank in that this is a four-day weekend, meaning concentrated quiet time will be sparse until at least 9 p.m., by which time my mental functioning has, shall we say, diminished. Once that set of papers goes back, the exams come in, as do the 21 papers for the Faith and Doubt seminar–but the latter should be relatively interesting and enjoyable to work through, not least because the students already submitted (and received detailed comments on) proposals. It’s a lot to get done, and in addition I am accutely (!) aware that time is running out to get a draft of the Soueif paper together to present at ACCUTE in May. (What am I doing writing this post, then, you ask? Well, you see, it has been a long day already, and I have a cold. You can’t mark papers under those conditions: you need a shred of generosity remaining so you don’t snark too cruelly when someone writes about [real example] “hardnosed” instead of “hardboiled” detection.)
The last two weeks of both classes seemed to go well enough. I wish the energy had been higher all term in Faith and Doubt. It’s no surprise that Jude the Obscure did not bring us to a rousing conclusion, though as usual the novel proved provocative enough to stimulate some good discussion, especially about Sue. I’m not sure how much of this is my fault (as several class members have studied the novel with me before) but the consensus seemed to be that she is thoroughly annoying, which is certainly my own reaction to her. The problem, of course, is that Jude adores her–idealizes her, even. Is this just another of his follies (Jude “Fawley,” get it?), like his early worship of Phillotson and his dreams about Christminster? Is she to him as, say, Amelia is to Dobbin, unworthy of the beauty and endurance of his love? Or is she some kind of ideal form of intellectual femininity freed from the animality of sex (the “not-Arabella”) and yet unable to escape the mundane realities of earthly relationships? Are we too supposed to yearn for her, and thus for the happy fulfilment of their love? The novel is sad either way, but it’s only really tragic if what Sue and Jude struggle for would be worth having, and the novel as a whole does seem to put its weight behind them, especially towards the end when even Widow Edlin asserts the truth of their illegitimate marriage over Sue’s legal (but appalling) union with Phillotson. Jude is so depressing I’d never teach it again, except that (a) it’s always a hit, (b) its themes resonate really well with those of other novels I teach, and (c) I don’t really look forward to exploring other Hardy options. I’ve assigned Tess a couple of times in seminars but never lectured on it; it’s equally depressing. Still, maybe a change would be as good as a rest. As part of the final group presentation, we got to play “Survivor: Christminster Edition,” which was fun, and appropriately ruthless (no help allowed–because after all, “nobody did come, because nobody does”).
In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we ended with City of Glass. I had hoped that working it up for teaching would temper my initial reaction. It did, somewhat. Given the context of the course, we mostly discussed it as an “anti-detective novel,” examining the ideas put forward via Quinn and his pseudonymous work as mystery novelist William Wilson about reading and writing detective fiction, and then the ways Quinn’s adventures as detective Paul Auster undermine the assumptions of certainty and meaning typically associated with the genre. For instance, with our other books we had talked quite a bit about the significance of objects as clues (sometimes comparing this fairly literal deployment with the “literary” use of objects as symbols): in City of Glass the expectation that one way or another objects or incidents (or characters) will be replete with meaning and cohere, over the course of the story, into a revealing pattern is pretty obviously frustrated. We touched (a bit lightly–as it’s not really that kind of course) on some underlying philosophical or theoretical ideas, such as poststructuralist critiques of the idea of a unified self, or slippages between signifieds and signifiers, or metaphysical problems about naming and identity (e.g. through Auster’s example of the malfunctioning umbrella). In some interviews I turned up, Auster has rejected the idea that he writes cerebrally, claiming that his books are about the music of language. Uh huh. I also invited us to look back across our earlier readings and see how far they correspond to the fairly reductive view Quinn gives of detective fiction. In their own ways, a number of them also unsettle supposed certainties–if not metaphysical, then certainly moral and epistemological. I don’t know how successful an addition the novel was to the course. I know already that a few students really liked it but others disliked it intensely, but then popularity is not always the best measure of pedagogical value. It certainly met my goal of introducing something very different from the other readings, and it challenged me intellectually, which is always a good thing for a teacher. I felt a bit uncertain working with it, but I’ll do better the second time (tune in next April for a full report…). Though I won’t know until I see the course evaluations later on whether the students felt the same way, I thought that overall the course went well this time, better than last year. Attendance was good, a lot of students were willing to put their hands up and pitch in with good ideas, they were very cooperative with group exercises–the energy in the room almost always seemed positive. I hope they felt that too.
What lies ahead? I’m not teaching this summer, which I regret a bit, as I always enjoy summer classes–but I think it was the right decision, as I need to sort out the various strands of my research. I’m also taking a real holiday, a trip to England, for the first time since 1986. I’m very excited about this! We are going just to Oxford (where my little hotel is directly across from Balliol) and London, so we will be able to concentrate our energy rather than rushing all over the place. Then here’s my teaching line-up for 2009-10:
I am thinking that I will ‘blog my teaching’ more selectively or in a different way next year, especially as some of these courses are ones I have covered before, if in slightly different versions. I still feel about this exercise, though, much as I did last year: it is at once a useful supplement to and a valuable record of the activity that takes up most of my professional time and energy.
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns: “A Man’s Accusing Finger Always Finds a Woman”
It seems almost trivial to comment on A Thousand Splendid Suns as a novel with this story in the headlines. (Not incidentally, I am infuriated at the tepid journalistic standards underwriting the description of the new law as one that “critics say would severely undermine women’s rights”–it does undermine women’s rights–I’m pretty sure that the main difference between the law’s “critics” and its proponents is simply whether they are fine with that or not–is this dodgy phrasing in the interests of some flawed idea of objectivity in reporting?)
A Thousand Splendid Suns is not an outstanding novel qua novel; there’s nothing stylistically breathtaking or formally innovative about it. The inevitable comparison for me is to The Swallows of Kabul, which is more artful, if less far-reaching in its scope. But Swallows also partakes somewhat of the genre of the fable or parable, which changes our readerly relationship to it: it used its historical and political contexts more delicately. Hosseini’s novel, in contrast, seems extraordinarily grounded, from its detailed descriptions of the landscapes and cityscapes of Afghanistan to its careful chronicling of the shifting of power among nations, factions, and individuals. Though at times I felt the mechanisms of the novel turning too clearly (as I also felt when reading The Kite Runner), it is nonetheless is an absolutely harrowing read. I finished it feeling equal parts enraged and heartbroken. There is perhaps something manipulative in the relentless movement of the novel from bad to worse and worse again, but the suffering of the individual characters is convincingly shown to be part of broader contexts. Unlike, for example, Anna Quindlen’s Black and Blue, which is also harrowing in its account of spousal abuse but limited in its historical analysis and contextualization, A Thousand Splendid Suns shows the social and cultural–and, ultimately, political–structures that support the devaluation, degradation, and violence endured by Mariam and Laila. The novel performs superbly one of the things fiction has done so well and vitally since at least the nineteenth century, with novels like Oliver Twist or Mary Barton: it puts a human face on systematic failures and abuses, ensuring that abstractions such as “severely undermining women’s human rights” get, as it were, fleshed out. Here’s the slightly laboured expository summary Hosseini gives, for instance, of the changes after the takeover of Kabul by the Mujahideen:
The freedoms and opportunities that women had enjoyed between 1978 and 1992 were a thing of the past now–Laila could still remember Babi saying of those years of communist rule, It’s a good time to be a woman in Afghanistan, Laila. Since the Mujahideen takeover in April 1992, Afghanistan’s name had been changed to the Islamic State of Afghanistan. The Supreme Court under Rabbani was filled now with hardliner mullahs who did away with the communist-era decrees that empowered women and instead passed rulings based on Shari’a, strict Islamic laws that ordered women to cover, forbade their travel without a male relative, punished adultery with stoning.
Dry, perhaps, despite the punitive implications of what he’s describing, and I realize too that there are risks (both artistic and factual) in presenting as well as receiving a novel in too documentary a spirit. But those implications are rapidly given meaning by, for instance, the scenes following the abortive attempt of Mariam and Laila to leave the country (and their abusive husband) (apologies for the spoiler):
“What does it matter to you to let a mere two women go? What’s the harm in releasing us? We are not criminals.”
“I can’t.” [says the officer who sends them back]
“I beg you, please.”
“It’s a matter of qanoon, hamshira, a matter of law. . . . It is my responsibility, you see, to maintain order.”
In spite of her distraught state, Laila almost laughed. She was stunned that he’d used that word in the face of all that the Mujahideen factions had done–the murders, the lootings, the rapes, the tortures, the executions, the bombings. . . .
“If you send us back,” she said instead, “there is no saying what he will do to us.”
She could see the effort it took him to keep his eyes from shifting. “What a man does in his own home is his business.”
“What about the law then, Officer Rahman?” Tears of rage stung her eyes. “Will you be there to maintain order?”
“As a matter of policy, we do not interfere with private family matters, hamshira.”
“Of course you don’t. When it benefits the man. And isn’t this a ‘private family matter,’ as you say? Isn’t it?”
The women are cruelly beaten and confined on their return “home,” and when their husband releases them, starving and broken, they and he know the truth of his words: “You try this again and I will find you. I swear on the Prophet’s name that I will find you. And, when I do, there isn’t a court in this godforsaken country that will hold me accountable for what I will do.”
When the Taliban move in just a page later, the control they assert over women’s conduct and liberties is “only” an extreme form of what we have already seen, transferring completely to the public sphere what has been considered acceptable already in the household–namely, the horrors inflicted on women by men who cannot, or will not, be held accountable:
Attention women:
You will stay inside your home at all times. . . If you go outside, you must be accompanied by a mahram, a male relative. If you are caught alone on the street, you will be beaten and sent home.
You will not, under any circumstances, show your face. You will cover with burqa when outside. If you do not, you will be severely beaten. . . .
You will not laugh in public. If you do, you will be beaten. . . .
Girls are forbidden from attending school. All schools for girls will be closed immediately.
The novel ends not long after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. That the return of power and influence to the warlords, among other things, makes this intervention a mixed blessing to the people of the country is certainly one of Hosseini’s points, but so is the relief it brings to Afghanistan’s women from the insupportable injustices and cruelties perpetrated against them for far too long. What a shame, we might think, that the form of domestic terrorism many of them endured on a daily basis was not in itself reason to invade. (For a related argument along these lines, see Pamela Bone’s essay “They Don’t Know One Little Thing” in this volume.)
I note that the new Afghan law referred to above is described as a”family” law; among its provisions is one that forbids Shia women to leave home without their husbands’ permission. This is a concession to just that kind of genuinely “domestic” terrorism. Of course, one of the cornerstones of the last two centuries of feminist activism in the west has been the insistence that the family space is a political space, that essential to women’s full and equal participation in the human community is dismantling both implicit and explicit assumptions about power and control within the domestic sphere. In her powerful essay “Wife Torture in England” (found here, for instance), Victorian feminist Frances Power Cobbe notes that one of the chief obstacles to protecting women from domestic violence was the conviction of the British husband (supported, of course, by many branches of both law and society in the nineteenth century) that his wife was his property (“and may I not do what I like with my own?” she paraphrases the defense against the horrific crimes against women she reports). That was in 1868. Though nobody could say spousal abuse is a solved problem in the west, or that specific as well as systemic injustices don’t remain, at least (and this is no small accomplishment) we no longer treat women’s fundamental human rights as negotiable. In law, in principle, and to a large extent in practice, we have won that battle. I hope our national leaders (male, most of them) have the balls to fight it on behalf of all of the women in Afghanistan. The CBC report says the new law “only” affects 15% of the population. Hosseini’s novel reminds us (as if we could forget) that every woman in that 15% has a name, a story, and the right to leave her house or say no to her husband–no matter what passes for a “family” law or private matter.
Novel Readings 