It occurs to me: the deadline for my ACCUTE CFP has now passed and I have received a grand total of … zero … submissions. Hmmm. I have a theory expressible through the sophistication of a homemade Venn Diagram. Let RM=yours truly and MJ=Scribbing Woman and here’s what I think the situation is:
(cross-posted, slightly expanded, at The Valve)
This is a great week for me because in both of my classes I am teaching books I am really passionate about. In Introduction to Prose and Fiction, we have started Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and in 19th-Century Fiction, we are just finishing up Bleak House. It’s hard to imagine books more stylistically different: Dickens offers a teeming overabundance of words, characters, and plots, while Ishiguro at once models and thematizes restraint and understatement. Yet both are immensely moving and humane; their artistry is both intellectually and emotionally demanding, and their beauties are at once aesthetic and ethical. If, as Leslie Stephen said, we “measure the worth of a book by the worth of the friend it reveals to [us],” both offer us companionship of an inspiring kind. Wayne Booth proposes we consider what “kind of desirer” we become if we cooperate with the implied author of a text: “Is the pattern of life that this would-be friend offers one that friends might well pursue together?” The best literary “friends” are identified by “the irresistable invitation they extend to live during these moments a richer and fuller life than I could manage on my own.” (All quotations from from Booth’s The Company We Keep: an Ethics of Fiction, the only critical work I’ve read in a decade or more that I know has had a profound impact on how I imagine and articulate the task of criticism.) ions */ @font-face {font-family:”Bookman Old Style”; panose-1:2 5 6 4 5 5 5 2 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:647 0 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:””; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Bookman Old Style”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-ansi-language:EN-CA;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;=By these standards, I think both The Remains of the Day and Bleak House are among the very best.
Still, the devil is always in the details. So here’s what I tried to get done this week.
In Intro to Prose and Fiction, the topic today was first-person narration–again, since we have already spent two classes talking about that. A major interest of mine is helping them work with the concept of unreliability so that they can talk about it with some precision. For instance, it is important to control the urge, once you recognize that a narrator is not altogether to be trusted, to assume that you can’t believe anything they say and can just speculate wildly about what really happens. Point A: there is no “really happens”–there’s only what’s in the novel. Point B: unreliability works as a fictional device because there are limits to it. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for instance, we believe in the basic elements of the story: there is a house, there is a husband, there is a room with hideous patterned wallpaper. What we don’t believe is that there are women trapped in the wallpaper, or crawling in the garden, etc. I’m fascinated by the artistic feat of presenting two (at least) very different versions of one story with just one set of words, so I usually spend a lot of time on this issue. More specifically, we have been talking about Stevens’s ‘butlerspeak’ and how the tone and diction of his language helps us understand his character, including its problems and limits. We have begun making connections between the inadequacy of his language for expressing the human qualities of his life and the inadequacy of his values more generally. We’ve watched some excerpts of an interview with Ishiguro in which he remarks that he had an idea, working on the book, that “most of us [are] butlers–politically, and morally, perhaps, too.” This idea about what it means to be a metaphorical butler will be important to our discussions next week, when we will have moved further along in the book.
In 19th-Century Fiction, we spent Monday’s class and part of Wednesday’s considering the novel’s two narrators–Bleak House is unique among Dickens’s novels (as far as I know, among Victorian novels) in dividing our attention in quite this way, and the dramatic differences between the prophetic sage-like voice of the 3rd-person narrator and Esther’s almost excessively self-effacing and evasive voice invite careful consideration about why both approaches are necessary to achieve the novel’s goals. (One theory we worked on: to solve the social problems he focuses on, you need both breadth of analysis and perspective, and depth–sensitivity to the personal implications.) On Wednesday I also talked about the theme of infection, about ways we can read Jo’s illness metaphorically, for instance, as a symptom of the broader spiritual disease Dickens sees plaguing his society. It’s illuminating to compare the depiction of poverty and social decay in a more literal novel, like Gaskell’s Mary Barton, to Dickens’s handling of Tom-All-Alone’s. It rapidly becomes clear that literal, material, social, or economic causes are not Dickens’s primary interest. Like his philosophical mentor (and the dedicatee of Hard Times), Thomas Carlyle, Dickens tends to present the tangible aspects of poverty as manifestations of an underlying spiritual malaise or failure–of human fellowship or compassion. We looked at the ‘Irish Widow’ excerpt from “Past and Present” and discussed the ways in which infection literalizes the premise of Bleak House that everything, and everyone, is connected, even if you can’t see or anticipate how.
For some reason, on this reading I found the work Dickens does with Sir Leicester especially moving. It’s interesting to consider that in his own way, Sir Leicester becomes a charity case in the novel, as much in need of our compassion and sympathy as Jo ever is, and deserving of them, too, because he proves capable of a moral transformation through love. Here are the affecting descriptions of him after the discovery of Lady Dedlock’s guilty secret:
Sir Leicester, left alone, remains in the same attitude, as though he were still listening and his attention were still occupied. At length he gazes round the empty room, and finding it deserted, rises unsteadily to his feet, pushes back his chair, and walks a few steps, supporting himself by the table. Then he stops, and with more of those inarticulate sounds, lifts up his eyes and seems to stare at something.
Heaven knows what he sees. The green, green woods of Chesney Wold, the noble house, the pictures of his forefathers, strangers defacing them, officers of police coarsely handling his most precious heirlooms, thousands of fingers pointing at him, thousands of faces sneering at him. But if such shadows flit before him to his bewilderment, there is one other shadow which he can name with something like distinctness even yet and to which alone he addresses his tearing of his white hair and his extended arms.
It is she in association with whom, saving that she has been for years a main fibre of the root of his dignity and pride, he has never had a selfish thought. It is she whom he has loved, admired, honoured, and set up for the world to respect. It is she who, at the core of all the constrained formalities and conventionalities of his life, has been a stock of living tenderness and love, susceptible as nothing else is of being struck with the agony he feels. He sees her, almost to the exclusion of himself, and cannot bear to look upon her cast down from the high place she has graced so well.
And even to the point of his sinking on the ground, oblivious of his suffering, he can yet pronounce her name with something like distinctness in the midst of those intrusive sounds, and in a tone of mourning and compassion rather than reproach.
And just a bit later,
“My Lady is too high in position, too handsome, too accomplished, too superior in most respects to the best of those by whom she is surrounded, not to have her enemies and traducers, I dare say. Let it be known to them, as I make it known to you, that being of sound mind, memory, and understanding, I revoke no disposition I have made in her favour. I abridge nothing I have ever bestowed upon her. I am on unaltered terms with her, and I recall—having the full power to do it if I were so disposed, as you see—no act I have done for her advantage and happiness.”
His formal array of words might have at any other time, as it has often had, something ludicrous in it, but at this time it is serious and affecting. His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and true. Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be seen in the best–born gentleman. In such a light both aspire alike, both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally.
Today, as we wrapped up our too-short time for the novel, I emphasized the importance of affect, pathos, and sentimentality in Dickens’s project of fiction as an agent of social reform. Though there are many respects in which I think Bleak House exemplifies self-contained aesthetic possibilities, in its formal structure and thematic coherence, its unifying metaphors, and so on, there’s no mistaking Dickens’s intention to shake us out of our complacence about the state of our world and our own responsibility for those who suffer. I can’t think of a novelist today who could do this and not sound ridiculous:
The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.
What makes this an impossible move today? Many things, I suppose, from the fragmentation of our sense of audience, or of readers (who is included in “you” or “us” these days?), to changing theories about the role of art in society. But for Dickens, there’s nothing inartistic about reaching out from his text in this way. His novels have nothing in common with the kind of literary artefacts meant to sit, like golden bowls on a mantlepiece, and be admired. At the end of Hard Times, he’s even more direct:
Dear reader! It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray and cold.
And here is where I feel the two novels I’m teaching converging. Both inspire reflections on how we might look at what remains of our own days and how we will judge our contributions to a wider world, as well as to ourselves.
It’s me again. I tuned in this morning and once again I have cause to thank you: I am so happy that finally there’s a radio station giving air time to such commercially unsuccessful artists as James Blunt and the Barenaked Ladies. My tax dollars should definitely go to making sure they get heard, and not to something as culturally peripheral as, say, the CBC Radio Orchestra. It’s a relief, also, especially in the morning, not to get those jarring contrasts we used to get when switching from commercial top-40-oriented radio stations to Radio 2. All those violins and harpsichords that would just come out of nowhere, interrupting the flow of banal lyrics!
Sincerely,
RM
PS James Blunt? Seriously?!
PPS Nothing against the Ladies, really.
It’s easy to get discouraged when you’re teaching first-year English. A lot of people in the room don’t really want to be there and don’t see why they should care much about the course, except that they need to fufill a writing requirement. Sometimes they even tell you as much. That can make you cranky, defensive, or even a little bit sad. Still, you show up with your game face on and do the best you can to show them reasons to care. You try not to let your own commitment or enthusiasm flag. You teach as if they are all with you, because that’s the highest compliment you know how to pay them, as well as the only way to face coming to class again and again. And of course many of them are with you: they are basically well-meaning and open-minded kids, and even if they do see your class primarily as a requirement, they’ll put in the effort and see what they learn from it. Still, you’re always aware of those lurking skeptics, which is why it is especially nice to hear, from the very student whose earlier words rankled so, “I’m changing my major … to English.”
Recently The Telegraph reported on the contribution fiction can make to international development, as examined by a study done by a team of scholars at Manchester University and the London School of Economics:
[Dr. Rodgers, of Manchester University’s Brooks World Poverty Institude] said: “Despite the regular flow of academic studies, expert reports, and policy position papers, it is arguably novelists who do as good a job – if not a better one – of representing and communicating the realities of international development.
“While fiction may not always show a set of presentable research findings, it does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does.
“And fiction often reaches a much larger and diverse audience than academic work and may therefore be more influential in shaping public knowledge and understanding of development issues.”
Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner “has arguably done more to educate Western readers about the realities of daily life in Afghanistan under the Taliban and thereafter than any government media campaign, advocacy organisation report, or social science research”, said the report. (read the rest here)
I actually supervised an honours thesis in Dalhousie’s International Development Studies program that examined Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South for its implicit and explicit contributions to theories of development. One source we found useful in setting up the project was Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice, which makes a related case for the potential value of literature and the “literary imagination” in developing public policy; another was an essay by Richard Horton in the TLS called “Mr. Thornton’s Experiments.” The risk of such analyses is that they risk reducing literary works to their social or historical content. What I’ve always liked about Nussbaum’s work in theory is that she aspires to consider literary form, rather than to abstract social or political messages from her texts. In practice, I don’t think she always manages to do this, but the idea that literary form is itself expressive of philosophical and other ideas seems to me a case she (and others including Wayne Booth) make quite convincingly. The IDS student I worked with did a good job at incorporating explicit consideration of genre and form into her analysis.
(via.)
At ‘Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind,’ Kyle Minor offers some thoughts on the relationship between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction:
I did not set out to be a mystery writer or a crime writer, nor am I sure I am one now. That’s not to say that I don’t admire the genres, because I do. If forced to trade, I’ll take one Dennis Lehane, one Richard Price, one George Pelecanos, one James M. Cain, one Big Jim Thompson or Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett—any one of them, any day—over any ten “literary” writers. I mean it. Because all of these writers do all of the things to which literature ought to aspire—vivid evocation of character, an intelligent reckoning with thematic material that matters, an acquaintance with the music language can make—while, at the same time, giving us a sock-in-the-gut story in a time and place of consequence.
(I also ought to mention, while we’re speaking of it, that contemporary crime and mystery writers are lately doing another thing that literature used to do more often, which is to work out intractable social problems on a big canvas and consider the workings of groups and systems as worthy as the individual of their attentions. I might argue, in fact, that the closest thing we have to Dostoevsky, Dickens, and Dos Passos these days is HBO’s The Wire, a television show helmed by nonfiction crime writer David Simon, with episodes penned by Lehane, Price, and Pelecanos. But that’s an argument for another day, another essay.) (read the rest here)
This is well-travelled territory for anyone who teaches mystery fiction, as readers of this blog will know. The remark about ‘The Wire’ sounds a bit familiar too… But the distinctions between varieties of fiction do matter, if only insofar as our assumptions about them affect our reading practices–something highlighted to great comic effect in Thurber’s “The Macbeth Murder Mystery.” The exercise of drawing up “a list of mystery stories that belong in the literary canon, and a list of canonical works of literature that are, at their core, mysteries” is fun, as drawing up lists always is. On the other hand, highlighting mystery novels that count as literary rather perpetuates the idea that most of them don’t–an assumption I don’t actually disagree with, but then, I wouldn’t consider all “canonical” works equally literary either. Of Minor’s list, I’d think the Hammett and Chandler hardly need defending on these grounds anymore. I haven’t read Lush Life, but unless it is much better than Clockers, it wouldn’t be on my list: I thought Clockers was well conceived and constructed, but not very well written. (Probably it would have seemed more original if I hadn’t just watched all of The Wire.) Minor’s list is also weighted towards American hard-boiled and police procedurals, but I would consider P. D. James one example of someone working within the British tradition who uses the strong structural frame of a detective story to do some very thoughtful and literary things (A Taste for Death comes to mind, as does An Unsuitable Job for a Woman). Ian Rankin, also, is an obvious example of a writer whose crime fiction shows both social and thematic reach and literary sophistication. But it’s the conversation generated, rather than the lists themselves, that seems to me most valuable on these occasions: we should all keep thinking and talking about what qualities make some books better or more important than others, no matter where they are usually shelved in the bookstore.
(via.)
I’ve been trying for a while to find a conceptual framework that will unify the various reading and writing activities I’ve been doing. The immediate, pragmatic motivation for bringing things into some kind of order is that it’s about time I applied for some research grant money to support those activities (and by “support,” I mean pretty basic stuff, like buying ink cartridges for my office printer or paying for research-related xeroxing, not to mention buying books, renewing memberships in professional associations, or upgrading my take-home computer equipment–all expenses that are not covered by my department or faculty). There is money to be had, internally and externally, but of course to get any of it you need to have a research project defined clearly enough to justify your demands. I have a couple of objections to this system. One of them is just to the principle of the thing: doing research is part of my job, so I’ve never understood why I have to scrounge up the money necessary to get it done. Another is to the inflationary effect of the grant application process. Except for the occasional conference trip, I don’t actually need much money–what I really need is time to think and read. In terms of funding, what I’d like is enough to cover the basics (cartridges, xeroxing, books) on an ongoing basis. I’d like to feel I can keep reading and thinking and looking things up and writing things until I reach a point at which I can’t express my ideas and findings adequately in short form but need the time and resources to produce a book that will do them justice. Instead, I have to start the process assuming I’m writing a book, because that’s the kind of project that gets grants. So I have to inflate the significance and scope of what I’m currently doing, and what I plan to do next, so that I can ask for enough money to get taken seriously. (SSHRC standard grants, for instance, now require a minimum budget of $7000, but we’re generally advised to ask for a lot more). Our main internal source of research funding clearly spells out in its terms that it is seed money for SSHRC-fundable projects, so it is also not hospitable to exploratory work, and it also rules out what it calls “basic research overhead,” which it declares is the responsibility of our departments and faculties. It doesn’t say exactly what counts as “basic research overhead,” but I’m thinking that category probably includes things like printing and xeroxing, and maybe books (which I know SSHRC used to refuse to pay for)–and it specifically excludes computer equipment. So some fancy footwork is required to explain one’s research needs in a way that will at once meet the approved criteria and actually provide the things one needs for one’s research. And, to get back to my main point, the whole thing has to be framed as an attempt to accomplish some clearly defined research endeavor…ideally, one that builds in some coherent way on past research accomplishments.
Of course, I have applied for research funding before, and I have used the resources I obtained responsibly and gotten things done–published, even. I haven’t made a successful SSHRC application yet; my one attempt (which, in retrospect, I admit was enthusiastic but naive in its presentation) was slapped down hard enough that I wasn’t very motivated to try again, though it’s interesting to me that I have, after all, gone on to do some key parts of the ‘program of research’ described in it, so it can’t have been altogether wrongheaded. The most recent internal money I got was to help me get the Broadview anthology taken care of. But now that’s all gone, and so is my last print cartridge and any remaining credits on my copy cards. So it’s time to go back and ask for some more. But for what?
My problem is (and I realize that I have brought it on myself by the choices I’ve been making about how to use my time) my attention has been increasingly diffused over the past couple of years. Instead of picking one critical problem and pursuing it consistently, I’ve been looking around at a lot of different things. Why have I been doing this? Well, for one thing, I can’t seem to bring into focus any one critical problem that feels urgent to me: I can’t find something to work on that seems truly necessary and exciting, and I’ve chosen to indulge–or respect–my weariness with the flood of academic microcontributions that has resulted from the incessant pressure to publish as soon as possible and as often as possible. I felt that academic scholarship tended too far away from the liveliness and urgency of literature and I wanted to look outside to see how non-academics talked about books, or how academics talked about books outside of ‘work’ that maybe had more mobility and potency. And the first thing to really hit me once I started looking around in this way was just how ignorant my own specialized research had made me. Behold, I knew not anything! Or at least not anything that anybody else was likely to take an interest in–or so it seemed.
This was the point at which I began a relatively systematic exploration of books about books, as well as books about the relationship between academic criticism and what we might call ‘public’ criticism. This was also the point at which I began taking more time writing blog posts and tentatively looking for a place for myself (small, no frills, just a corner of my own) in the wider world of book talk. It took me almost no time to realize that I am very poorly equipped to be a public intellectual: graduate training does not produce generalists, and life pre-tenure, not to mention life post-babies, does not make it any easier to broaden your reach. Still, my professional work has given me some equipment for analyzing books that aren’t Victorian novels, and it was both educational and fun to see how that might work. I have also written about academic issues and about my teaching, both exercises in mobilizing what I know in new ways. Along the way, I think I’ve done some decent thinking and writing. (I’ve written before about the intrinsic benefits of blogging; making connections with other readers and writers, academic and not, has been the very best part of this experiment so far.) I’ve also completed the Broadview anthology and puttered along with my inquiry into Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun as an engagement with Middlemarch, so it isn’t as if I’ve been doing nothing but playing online. However, I do feel that I have fallen behind in my supposed area of specialization, because while I was looking the other way, the flood of new publications continued. Now I feel inadequate in two directions!
Overall, though, I’ve been doing so much reading and writing that it seems as if it must add up to something. So far, however, I just can’t see what. I can see a strong convergence between my metacritical inquiry into the nature of academic criticism and its alienation from the wider reading public, on the one hand, and my attempt (primarily through blogging) to find a different kind of criticism, though so far that attempt is not systematic or particularly ambitious. I can see links, too, between those issues and my work on 19th-century criticism (very much an activity of the public sphere). But I don’t really want to do a project about criticism so much as I want to do criticism differently…but it’s hard to see how to do writing about the literature I’m best prepared to write about (Victorian literature) in a non-academic way, because non-academic book talk seems (reasonably enough) preoccupied with contemporary writers about whom, and about whose contexts, I discover I am in many respects an amateur. So perhaps the Soueif project stands as a way of bringing 19th-century literature into a modern discussion because that is what Soueif herself does by taking Middlemarch as in some way her starting point?
Well, I’m not going to arrive at any answers tonight, and there may in fact be no answer that draws these different threads together. Maybe what I need to do for the grant application is articulate fully the interests and goals of the Soueif essay and never mind the rest. But I’d like to think there’s a point to the rest of it too. I’m also aware that exploring without a shaping purpose eventually becomes dilettantism, and I’m convinced of the importance of being earnest even without a research grant to strive for, so any time I can clear some mental space, I’ll think about it some more.
My “Things To Do” list for today:
Maybe going public like this will help me stay on task! (11/5: Also, this list is an interesting historiographical example, in that it records the completely mundane nature of this day from an individual perspective, even as it acknowledges its glancing intersection with ‘world-historical’ events.)
In my first-year class, we’re still working on short fiction. Today’s selection was “A Small Good Thing,” by Raymond Carver. One thing I enjoy about intro classes is the chance to dabble in material outside my usual range, and that certainly describes Carver. I find this particular story (the only one of his I really know besides “Cathedral”) very moving, and yet, as I was discussing with my class today, his conspicuously non-literary style makes the move from reading to interpretation initially difficult for me. By non-literary, what I mean is that he writes, with an almost flat affect, strings of fairly simple declarative sentences describing quite ordinary people and objects. It’s not immediately easy to get a purchase on what is important (beyond plot–which in “A Small Good Thing” is a strong factor, as the story turns on a couple of dramatic moments, including a car accident). Of course, what we realize is that the literary effect lies precisely in getting us to notice those ordinary people and objects, and seeing how they become infused with meaning or cease to be ordinary: a birthday cake, a bicycle, a car in a parking lot. I enjoyed reading through the material posted on the New York Times’s ‘featured author’ site for Carver, particularly Jay McInerney’s account of the rigor Carver brought to his teaching:
Though Ray was always encouraging, he could be rigorous if he knew criticism was welcome. Fortunate students had their stories subjected to the same process he employed on his own numerous drafts. Manuscripts came back thoroughly ventilated with Carver deletions, substitutions, question marks and chicken-scratch queries. I took one story back to him seven times; he must have spent 15 or 20 hours on it. He was a meticulous, obsessive line editor. One on one, in his office, he almost became a tough guy, his voice gradually swelling with conviction.
Once we spent some 10 or 15 minutes debating my use of the word ”earth.” Carver felt it had to be ”ground,” and he felt it was worth the trouble of talking it through. That one exchange was invaluable; I think of it constantly when I’m working. Carver himself used the same example later in an essay he wrote that year, in discussing the influence of his mentor, John Gardner. ”Ground is ground, he’d say, it means ground, dirt, that kind of stuff. But if you say ‘earth,’ that’s something else, that word has other ramifications.”
Wednesday it’s Alice Munro’s “The Found Boat” and Friday (for fun, before a long weekend), it’s Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat.” I always find teaching a unit on short fiction a disconcertingly miscellaneous experience, but one hope is that the variety suits the mix of constituencies inevitably present in a first-year class.
It’s still Bleak House in my 19th-century fiction class. In the last two meetings I’ve been working on ways to organize the overflow of information we get in the novel as new plots and characters tumble out relentlessly at every turn of the page. Last time, for instance, we worked on houses and families, with a particular interest in ways the idea of ‘housekeeping’ becomes a metaphor for national concerns as much as domestic ones and small acts like Jo’s sweeping the entry to the paupers’ graveyard become emblems of grace in a corrupt environment. Today we’ll turn from this ‘theme and variations’ approach to the novel’s detection plot, its pursuit of the mystery of Lady Dedlock’s connection to the mysterious law-writer ‘Nemo,’ which provides a strong forward momentum for the novel. We’ll talk about what’s at stake in the contest between Lady Dedlock and Mr. Tulkinghorn, about the relationship between knowledge and power, or evidence and control, and about sexuality and morality. If I can work it in, we’ll consider the role played by affect or emotion in directing our judgment in the novel. The strongest example will come with Jo’s death later on, but in the installment for today we have what we might consider the emotional case made for Lady Dedlock–for our compassion and forgiveness for her sexual fall:
As Sir Leicester basks in his library and dozes over his newspaper, is there no influence in the house to startle him, not to say to make the very trees at Chesney Wold fling up their knotted arms, the very portraits frown, the very armour stir?
No. Words, sobs, and cries are but air, and air is so shut in and shut out throughout the house in town that sounds need be uttered trumpet–tongued indeed by my Lady in her chamber to carry any faint vibration to Sir Leicester’s ears; and yet this cry is in the house, going upward from a wild figure on its knees.
“O my child, my child! Not dead in the first hours of her life, as my cruel sister told me, but sternly nurtured by her, after she had renounced me and my name! O my child, O my child!”
I mentioned one of these novels, briefly, before: Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park, describing it as “a very angry book, bitter even,” and asking whether its manifest bitterness arise from “the realization that social and material privilege make anger seem petulant (such spoiled children, her women seem!).” My retrospective reflections on it have not led to answers about how far it is in fact angry and how far it is a satire on unearned anger. It’s certainly an uncomfortable book and one wholly lacking in sentimentality about either marriage or motherhood:
She was in her car, cruising through the rain along the High Street while the turbid seas of Arlington Park parted before her. It was nine-fifteen. Her husband had left the house punctually at eight, and her daughter Jessica was at school by nine; she had a feeling of rapid ascent, as though the members of her household were sandbags she was heaving one by one out of the basket of a hot-air balloon.
It is also an intensely written book, to borrow an expression I recently read used to describe the language of Bleak House–and in fact, Arlington Park at times displays a verbal quality that approximates the Dickensian, in the elaborate opening set piece describing the rain that falls all night across the tony suburb, for example:
The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flower in the arid starlit sky. They came over the English countryside, sunk in its muddled sleep. They came over the low, populous hills where scatterings of lights throbbed in the darkness. At midnight they reached the city, valiantly glittering in its shallow provincial basin. Unseen, they grew like a second city overhead, thickening, expanding, throwing up their savage monuments, their towers, their monstrous, unpeopled palaces of cloud.
Perhaps fortunately, though (as this kind of thing is really hard to do persuasively, if you aren’t actually Dickens and a genuis), the style is much sparer for most of the novel, though still frequently striking in its images. I was struck by the praise for Cusk’s “fearlessness” and “honesty” in the reviews, and I think one thing that drew me to the novel was interest in just what she was being so brave about. I guess I don’t really see it. Is the myth of either maternal or marital bliss still potent enough that it takes courage to imagine women inhabiting their domestic roles angrily or selfishly? I suppose it’s a kind of anti-chick-lit novel, in which materialism is neither benign nor entertaining and neither Mr. Right nor the right address brings a fairy tale ending–and it acknowledges moments of exhiliration, enough, perhaps, to leaven the whole.
Penelope Lively’s Perfect Happiness is written much more delicately–it seems less of a performance. Moon Tiger has been on my top-10 list for many years, but I think this may be the first of Lively’s other novels that I’ve read. It actually surprised me by seeming indistinguishable in tone, scope, and what I might call “depth” from the better novels by Joanna Trollope (Marrying the Mistress, for instance): it focuses on a momentous time in a particular small cluster of intersecting lives and neatly, with precision but without flourish, works through the nuances and complications. I expected something more, somehow, and yet I thought it was both sensitive and intelligent.
I really wanted to like Jennifer Chiaverini‘s The Quilter’s Apprentice. (Why, you ask? Well, I’m an amateur quilter myself, and also it’s almost winter, so I will need comfort and distraction–something to read that’s cozy but not romantic sounds perfect, and there’s a whole series of these, plus actual quilting books.) I almost succeeded in liking it, too, but I had to work against the bad writing (Chiaverini explains too much, for one thing, as if she thinks her readers can’t infer anything at all or need to be walked from one piece of furniture to another every time her characters move across the room). There’s nothing wrong with the structure in theory, including the division of the narrative into present-day action and reminiscences, but the back story felt incredibly laboured to me. The explanations of quilting seemed forced, though maybe to someone who knew absolutely nothing about the processes or patterns it would be interesting to learn about all this. Would it have been more effective, maybe, to include a ‘Quilting Primer’ as an appendix rather than incorporating quilting lessons so literally and in so much detail into the body of the novel? The characters, too, seem well-enough conceived and organized, but the characterization seemed so forced. Oh, and while I’m complaining, the language is surprisingly unimaginative: eyes shine, resentments smolder, stomachs tighten, memories are recalled with pangs. Maybe Chiaverini hits her stride further along in the series–and in fact I like the general idea here enough to try another one or two, and without quite the cringing feeling I sometimes get from other kinds of chick-lit (which this undoubtedly is, though of a more domesticated variety than Sophie Kinsella or her ilk). The focus on women’s friendships (quilting bees, of course, lend themselves–or could–to nice metaphorical development with respect to women’s support networks as well as other kinds of social cooperation) and women’s arts (also a theme here, also laboriously developed) just seems less … icky … than the other stuff often does. (Quick update: I pulled ‘How to Make an American Quilt’ from my shelf on my way out this morning–I have only vague recollections of reading it before, but the critical praise it received makes it sound more like the ‘great American quilting novel’ than this one.)
So: a rather miscellaneous group of books, but they’ve all been sitting in a “TBB” pile for a while (To Be Blogged, of course) so I thought I’d write them up. The artificial exercise of working with them as a group has made me think a bit about the arbitrariness of categories such as “women’s writing,” or “women writers,” ones we often have recourse to in the academy (for instance, I regularly teach a graduate seminar on “Victorian Women Writers”). I usually draw attention to the problem of that arbitrariness, not least because many of the women writers I teach explicitly wished for their sex not to be a factor in the consideration of their artistic accomplishments. And why should we assume that writers have anything in common because they are of the same sex? At the same time, with the 19th-century writers, I propose there is some justification for grouping them together because, after all, as women they did have some things in common, including the social, legal, and political conditions of their lives and work, and their inevitably vexed relationship with literary traditions (sweeping statements, I know, but useful, and certainly true in their broad outlines). I don’t know if I could make any such claim about this little cluster of more contemporary writers, or if my sense that doing so would be misleading (and pointless to boot) reflects back in any way on how I approach the 19th-century material. Something to think about, maybe. Or maybe this is just too random a selection of reading to mean much anyway.
