“A Question of Vision”: Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

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He offered not only his whole laughing self . . . but also the torch he carried before him in the dark, his understanding, dazzling, instant, that there was goodness at her core. With the gift came the bitter seed of regret, the unbridgeable gap between the Mathilde she was and the Mathilde he had seen her to be. A question, in the end, of vision.

Fates and Furies ends with a paean to the unheralded rituals a long marriage, and a long life, is made of:

Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life. The hundreds of times she’d dug in the soil of her garden . . . Or this: every day they woke in the same place, her husband waking her with a cup of coffee, the cream still swirling into the black. Almost unremarked upon, this kindness. he would kiss her on the crown of her head before leaving, and she’d feel something in her rising through her body to meet him. These silent intimacies made their marriage, not the ceremonies or parties or opening nights or occasions or spectacular fucks.

If the rest of the novel, leading up to this passage, were about those things, and written in that same pensive, tender register, I would have liked it a lot — loved it, maybe. But instead it’s a novel of extremes. It’s a theatrical book — not just literally, as is appropriate to its playwright hero and his milieu, including his artfully role-playing wife, but also in its big gestures and its melodramatic flourishes and its poses, its self-consciously uttered lines. It’s not a novel about “silent intimacies” between ordinary people: it’s about extraordinary people with implausibly twisted backstories, whose presents are haunted by their pasts, and whose gifts are underwritten by their secrets.

The result is an intriguing spectacle but not, for me, an engaging human story. I realize that the title is a clue that it is not (or, not just) a human story but a story that aspires to something larger, grander, more mythical. I don’t think I really got what that other thing was: the intricate details of Groff’s people and their lives, together and apart, perhaps distracted me from ways she has woven something else out of them. But at any rate for me, that element of grandiosity, whatever its intent, came at a cost: it kept me apart from the novel, so that I felt the whole time that I was watching it, rather than reading it. It’s an operatic novel, full of people driven by passion, structured around a convoluted revenge tragedy. I couldn’t reconcile that hyperbolic dimension of the novel with its more earthbound attention to the strange dynamics of marriage. It turned marriage itself into a kind of opera — but then it all seemed so exaggerated. Who actually lives at such a pitch of intensity? Who hides so much, or needs so much, or plots so much? And you certainly wouldn’t know from the bulk of the novel that “spectacular fucks” weren’t the most important part of Lotto and Mathilde’s marriage.

Aspects of Groff’s prose contributed to my alienation. A lot of it is very written. I don’t necessarily mind that, and I didn’t always here, where I was frequently impressed by her phrasing, with its unexpected diction and interesting rhythms:

Look at them together. The height of them, the shine on them. Her pale and wounded face, a face that had watched and never smiled now never stopped smiling. It was as if she’d lived all her life in the chilly shadows and someone had led her out into the sun. And look at him. All his restless energy focused tightly on her. She sharpened something that threatened to go diffuse in him.

But I hated the bracketed interruptions: I couldn’t understand their purpose, which did not seem consistent. Sometimes they offered choric commentary, as if from outside the story, but at other times they simply seemed like an awkward device to shift the point of view or the time frame. Here, for instance: “Chollie saw the man whispering in her ear, saw his hand disappear in the darkness between her legs. She let it, passive. [On the surface; beneath, the controlled burn.]” Why not integrate that observation? Whose is it, anyway? Not Chollie’s, presumably, but if it’s the narrator’s, why set it off? To me, many of these interjections felt like notes left over from a draft stage of the novel. If you need it, if it’s important, incorporate it. Do you want an intrusive narrator or don’t you? These comments felt like afterthoughts, like a tic or a mannerism rather than a style.

groff2I can tell I sound peevish, and I suspect, too, that I’m not doing the novel justice — that I was reading it wrong, that I am hung up (as we can all get) in wondering why it isn’t a different kind of book, my kind of book, instead of the book it is. But I am also trying to put my finger on what about it turned me off, especially because it took a while for me to start chafing against it. Perhaps it is telling that my irritation began more or less when it switched from his story to hers, and she’s the one with the malignant capacity for deceit, she’s the angry one, she’s the one who may not, in spite of what Lotto thought, have “goodness at her core.” We’re supposed to be uncomfortable with her, I’m sure — but in her beautiful duplicity does she turn out to be just a sexist cliché, a kind of modern-day Duessa? Or is my vision of her as wrong as Lotto’s?

Don’t get me wrong: I read Fates and Furies with unflagging attention and much admiration. In the end it left me cold, though: it had me thinking back on, say, Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, which, for all its narrative trickery, is rich with appreciation and sympathy for “the small and the daily,” as well as for their vexed place in a world full of events that are anything but quotidian. If I said the quality I felt was missing from Groff’s novel was heart, would that sound too earnest or sentimental? Would it be fair?

“I am not paying for talk”: Charles Portis, True Grit

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

truegrit

I said, “I have left off crying, and giggling as well. Now make up your mind. I don’t care anything for all this talk. You told me what your price for the job was and I have come up with it. Here is the money. I aim to get Tom Chaney and if you are not game I will find somebody who is game. All I have heard out of you so far is talk. I know you can drink whiskey and I have seen you kill a gray rat. All the rest has been talk. They told me you had grit and that is why I came to you. I am not paying for talk. I can get all the talk I need and more at the Monarch boarding house.”

When I tell you that the closest thing to a Western I’d read before True Grit was No Country for Old Men, you’ll understand how unprepared I was for Portis’s strange, surprising, action-packed yet character-driven novel. I don’t know the tropes it relies on, or revises; I don’t know the history it incorporates, or appropriates; I don’t know the landscape its story moves across; I don’t know what other literary characters, if any, keep company with Mattie Ross or Rooster Cogburn or Lucky Ned Pepper. I have thought a little about Westerns in the context of American crime fiction, especially hard-boiled detective fiction, which is often linked to a “frontier mentality” and the appeal of vigilante justice, and which is often written in a terse, demotic style appropriate for tough guys and cowboys with no words to waste. But True Grit is the first novel I’ve read that definitely qualifies as a classic of the genre.

I was interested in reading True Grit because I’m thinking about what to assign for Pulp Fiction next year. The calendar description for this course says that it “provides an entry point to the discussion of literature through ‘pulp’ genres such as romance, mystery/crime, the Western, sci-fi/fantasy, horror, sports literature, and comic books.” I can’t remember when we approved this description, but it strikes me now as an odd and somewhat elitist conflation of “pulp fiction” with genre fiction. While they certainly overlap, they aren’t necessarily the same, are they? Dictionary.com defines “pulp fiction” as “fiction dealing with lurid or sensational subjects, often printed on rough, low-quality paper manufactured from wood pulp,” which I think better reflects the connotations of the term, along with its historical origins. (Louis Menand’s New Yorker article on “The Birth of Pulp Fiction” gives a nice overview of that history in the context of reviewing Paula Rabinowitz’s American Pulp, which I’ve just taken out from the library.)

rabinowitzDefining my terms, which in turn will define my boundaries, is clearly one of the first thing I have to do. It’s inevitably going to be a somewhat arbitrary exercise, and the stakes aren’t that high given that the course is one of our first-year writing requirement classes and, as the calendar description implies, its main purpose is just to begin students’ training in literary studies. It doesn’t have to be an in-depth, theoretically complex, or even particularly thorough exploration of pulp fiction, whatever that is. It differs from the first-year class I usually teach (Introduction to Prose and Fiction) only in having what we hope is a sexier hook — it promises readings that at least sound more fun than what you might get in a standard literature class. Students in recent incarnations of the course, then, might have been surprised to find themselves reading Pride & Prejudice, Jane Eyre, or Much Ado About Nothing, all of which I have seen in recent Pulp Fiction syllabi!

These versions of the course seem to have emphasized things like the way our current classics were the popular entertainment of their day, or differences and continuities between “high” and “low” forms of genre fiction. These are smart things to do, and they allow for a really broad historical range in the readings, but I’m leaning more towards a course that embraces the “lurid or sensational,” or that focuses on unapologetic examples of the different genres rather than on their most deliberately literary (or “literary”) versions. This is more or less the approach I’ve taken to the Mystery & Detective Fiction class: though I’ve occasionally included something like Paul Auster’s City of Glass, I have mostly tried to avoid the kind of crime fiction that overtly aims to “transcend the genre.” (How Ian Rankin hates that phrase! Cue up to 7:20 to get to that particular point.) So, no Austen in my Pulp Fiction class, and no Cormac McCarthy either!

I have plenty of ideas about romance and mystery novels that might work well for this course, but the other genres on the list in the official description are not at all my bailiwick. Luckily I don’t have to cover them all, and in a one-term writing requirement course I can only assign a few full-length novels anyway (three, maybe four, depending on their length) along with some short stories, so the question is: what else? And that brings me back (at last – sorry!) to True Grit. I put out a Twitter call for suggestions about classic Westerns to sample, and the ones that came up the most often were Elmore Leonard’s Valdez is Coming (and his story “3:10 to Yuma”), Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, Louis L’Amour’s Hondo, and True Grit. A helpful colleague dropped True Grit off at my office shortly after — and after puttering along with Emma for a while first, I burned through it in just a couple of hours last night.

True_Grit_(Charles_Portis_novel)-first-editionI’m not actually 100% sure True Grit is “pulpy”: does it transcend its genre? I think maybe it is to the general run of Westerns what Hammett or Chandler might be to crime fiction: still definitely of its kind, but the best, or most intense, version of it. Its story is simple and its pacing is relentless, but it’s the narrator that makes it particularly interesting. Mattie bristles with paradoxical qualities: she’s prim, abstemious, and insistently righteous, even as she’s razor-sharp and ruthless. She won’t touch a drop of whisky (“I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains”) but she doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger when she finally comes face to face with her father’s killer (“I pointed the revolver at his belly and shot him down”). She doesn’t much like the sight of hangings, but when she has to, she pulls the arm off a corpse and uses the long bone to save herself from falling into a pit of rattlesnakes (“I was grateful to the poor man for being tall”). Is she hilarious or heroic? Both and more, I think, and it’s her combination of naiveté and grit that wins over her jaded allies, who don’t want her along but then won’t leave her to die. And we hear all about it in the voice of aged Mattie, who still has no patience for people who waste time on pointless talk:

I never had the time to get married but it is nobody’s business if I am married or not married. I care nothing for what they say. I would marry an ugly baboon if I wanted to and make him cashier. I never had the time to fool with it. A woman with brains and a frank tongue and one sleeve pinned up and an invalid mother to care for is at some disadvantage, although I will say I could have had two or three old untidy men around here who had their eyes fastened on my bank. No, thank you!

True Grit recounts Mattie’s quest for justice, but she seeks it in a world where right and wrong overlap, where justice and the law often don’t coincide, and where, as Mattie often remarks, if you want a thing done, you’d best do it yourself, no matter the cost.

I liked True Grit a lot, especially but not just Mattie. I’d have a lot to learn before I could teach it, but I think I’d enjoy the process. Where my relationship with Westerns is concerned, this is significant — not to mention rapid — progress. It took me much longer to get the hang of reading romance novels! I think I’m going to hunt down Valdez is Coming next. It certainly sounds lurid and sensational: “They were still laughing when Valdez came back. And then they began to die.”

This Week In My Classes: Back to Busy-ness

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

januaryIt always takes a couple of weeks for a term to rev up and really get going: we have to get through a certain amount of reading, for example, before much writing can be done and thus for much marking to be needed. We are passing that point now, though, and this week I have already returned some paper proposals, there’s a batch of tests waiting for my red pen, the pace of submissions has picked up on reading journals, and that won’t be the end of it — not just this week but really for the whole term, since I have built in so many ‘small’ assignments (as part of my attempt to emphasize the process over the product) that from now on there will almost always be something coming in and something going back.

That’s OK, though, because that also means we’re past the start-of-term annoyances (more or less) — things like having to constantly update the class list as students add and drop classes (for two whole weeks! I’m sure I’ve mentioned that this drawn-out period of indecision is one of my pet peeves. I have tried but so far failed to convince administrators that while it may be a convenience for ‘customers,’ it is a pedagogical nightmare for both students and teachers.). And it also means we are getting used to each other so class discussion keeps getting better, and that we all more or less know what’s going on in terms of course requirements and policies and all the rest of the logistical stuff.

vanityfaircoverI should say that I think our final sessions on Pride & Prejudice went well in the 19th-Century Fiction class last week: whatever my misgivings about the novel’s intransigent popularity, that does mean a generally positive attitude in the classroom and a high percentage of people who are well (really well) caught up on the readings. We’ll see how their spirits hold up as we move into Vanity Fair, which we start on Friday. I am pretty excited about that, actually: I haven’t assigned Vanity Fair since 2010, so it will feel relatively fresh to me, and a quick poll showed that it’s completely new to all of the students. The actual OUP volume looks so vast and dour that I think they can’t help but be pleasantly surprised when they start reading. But before we get there I’m taking one class to do a workshop on how to write a good essay for the course — this has become a regular feature of my upper-level classes and reflects my ongoing efforts to make my expectations as clear and transparent as possible and to demystify, as far as possible, the concept of a “good essay.”

In Mystery & Detective Fiction, we are finishing up The Moonstone. I enjoy it so much that I’m almost sorry I’m taking a break from this class next year. It occurs to me that I could assign it in the 19th-Century Fiction class next year instead, since I’m doing the Dickens-to-Hardy version — but that’s my best chance to do The Woman in White, so I probably won’t.

As that comment shows, one of the things I’m busy with, if so far still haphazardly, is planning next year’s classes. We’ve got our course assignments and it won’t be long before we need to turn in preliminary course descriptions and reading lists, as registration begins in March and the whole course selection apparatus needs to be ready. The one I’m thinking about the most is Pulp Fiction, which I’ll be teaching for the first time next winter. I’ll save my many but currently quite inchoate ideas about that class for another post! But I will say that it’s a good example of why it’s hard to draw firm lines between work and not-work for people in my profession, or at least for me: many things I’ve read “for fun” in the past are now possible candidates for its reading list, and many things I’ll read in the next few months in case they’re perfect for it won’t be strictly work-related at first, and maybe never will be!

saturday-canadianI’ve also got a guest lecture on Ian McEwan’s Saturday coming up for a colleague’s class that seemed remote when I agreed to it but is now (eek) just over two weeks away. Wouldn’t you know it: I have a whole folder of materials on Saturday from when I taught it myself in 2006, but somehow I have no lecture notes specifically on the significance of “Dover Beach” in the novel, which is what I proposed talking to her class about (what with my being a Victorianist and all). Since I haven’t actually read Saturday since 2006, I should probably add rereading it to my to-do list…

Also looming uncomfortably close on the horizon is the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, which I am attending (weather permitting!) as a participant on a panel about criticism in the internet age, along with Dan Green and David Winters. I have an abstract of my paper and a mess of notes: now it’s time to get serious about shaping something presentable out of them! Aside from the work that will require and the stress of having travel plans for mid-February, I’m looking forward to the conference: the program is full of interesting things, and it will be great to meet Dan and David in person. I’ve known Dan virtually since I started blogging in 2007! (Maybe one day I’ll also meet the elusive Amateur Reader face to face. I would promise never to reveal his super-top-secret-real-life-identity!)

I’ve been busy with some writing, also, and with the usual editorial things for Open Letters Monthly. And as if all this isn’t enough, it’s also winter and we have had three storms in the past week, which means we’ve also been busy shoveling. So far it has not been that bad — the roads and sidewalks are getting decently cleared in pretty good time — but I was recently reminded that at this time last winter, Halifax hadn’t turned into Hoth yet either, and we’ve got nearly three months to go before we’re really out of danger.

I am managing a bit of non-required reading in the interstices of my days. I finished Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City but haven’t decided whether or how to blog about it. Now I’m about half way through my reread of Emma and it’s not going very well. I will persist, however — and then choose something a little less stuffy with a little more action in it. True Grit, maybe, which is on my list of Pulp Fiction possibilities and which by all appearances is pretty much the anti-Emma.

And that brings us pretty much up to date! I look forward to doing some more bookish blogging soon.

This Week In My Classes: The Pride and Prejudice Paradox

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

I don’t teach it very often anymore: it’s too popular.

This is my version, I guess, of Yogi Berra’s line “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

pride-and-prejudice-penguinPride and Prejudice is the only work I ever teach (in any genre) that has routinely been read already, often multiple times, by many of the students in the class. You’d think that would be a great thing — and actually, in some ways it is. Students who know the novel really well bring their own expertise to our discussions; their enthusiasm, also, enlivens it. Both of these things are freeing for me: I can count on informed participation and turn much more than usual to other people in the room to help me out with details, and I can also play devil’s advocate more, with less risk of sowing confusion and more chance of just stimulating debate.

I have been reminded this week, though, returning to Pride and Prejudice in the 19th-century fiction class after many years of assigning Persuasion instead, that the novel’s familiarity has its drawbacks as well. Over the years I have found that those who know it very well may be quite entrenched in their readings of it, for example, particularly about how they interpret or judge specific characters. Students who are strongly attached to particular adaptations may also be particularly prone to reading characters or scenes in particular ways. If they’ve always read the novel for pleasure before, they may not be accustomed to paying much attention to how it is written or structured, or to questioning its premises. Their love and knowledge of it may also intimidate their classmates who are reading it for the first time: too many remarks prefaced by “I’ve read this novel multiple times” would certainly have shut me up, when I was an undergraduate, because I would have been afraid my own preliminary observations wouldn’t hold up.

Obviously, these are all ultimately pedagogical issues: it’s up to me to try to make the novel fresh again, if I can — to introduce new questions or contexts, to posit alternative interpretations, to move us from character analysis to thematic or formal issues, to do my best to bring everyone into the discussion, to make the most of the wonderful fact that so many people read and reread Pride and Prejudice just because they want to. Wouldn’t it be great of that were true of more of the novels I assign, after all! And yet it’s not. Jane Eyre probably comes the closest, but even the Brontë enthusiasts are few and far between compared to the Austen lovers.

I wonder, actually, if part of the difficulty I have knowing quite what to do with the gift (and I do mean that!) of a room heavily populated with Janeites is that I’m not one myself. It’s impossible not to love Pride and Prejudice, of course. Though Persuasion is my personal favorite among Austen’s novels, I am on record exclaiming over the treat P&P always is to read. But Austen is not the novelist that thrills or interests me the most — she never has been, or my own research and teaching career would look much different! It’s that whole ineffable affinity thing: as Henry James said in that line from “The Art of Fiction” that I seem to quote more than anything else of his, “nothing will ever take the place of the good old fashion of ‘liking’ a work of art or not liking it.” For me, the result of “that primitive, that ultimate, test” was someone else — and not just one someone either, really, as I get more excited about a lot of other authors I read and teach than I do about Austen. I’m not trying to be contrarian or some kind of “hipster” Victorianist — my preferences are frightfully canonical, but they really are Victorian, which Austen, after all, is not.

In any case, while I do think Austen is great, she’s just one kind of great, not the only kind. Her unstoppable popularity sometimes seems like such a self-fulfilling prophecy. I can’t and don’t doubt the sincerity of her admirers, though, including those in my class. I really do welcome the energy, expertise, and keen attention they bring to discussion. I just hope I can keep them half as engaged when we move on to Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre, because I believe those novels are every bit as brilliant in their own (wildly different) ways as Pride and Prejudice is in its.

And maybe next time around I’ll try something else altogether — Emma, for instance, which would be a stretch for me and probably for more of my students, too, than is the case with Pride and Prejudice. Familiarity needn’t breed contempt, but I wonder if unfamiliarity isn’t a pedagogical advantage. This would be one way to find out!

This Week In My Classes: Orientation

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

You-Are-HereThe new term is underway, as you might guess from the sudden dearth of new blog posts. After all this time I am much better at the start-up logistics; what gets harder is adjusting to the sudden dramatic increase in demands on my energy. I was exhausted after every class meeting this week! But as we get deeper into our course material, more energy flows back towards me, and then the process feels less draining — on a good day, it’s even exhilarating!

One thing I found myself thinking a lot about as my classes got underway is the importance but also the difficulty of bringing us all together intellectually as well as physically. I always feel that before we can delve into the details of our particular readings, we need to establish some common ground. Because both the canon and our curriculum have diversified so much in the last few decades, there’s very little that I can expect everyone to know or to have read. Even with our most “advanced” seminar classes, I can’t expect students to have studied any of the material before, or even any material from the same genre or period. (This is increasingly true of students in graduate seminars as well.) While the range of knowledge and perspectives everyone brings can have some great results for our discussions, it can also mean things get a bit random and scattered, or that it’s hard to make connections meaningful enough to draw everybody in. So one thing I try to do at the beginning is sketch out some of the general territory in which our particular class is situated. This usually means providing historical and/or literary historical contexts, but it can also mean setting up some conceptual frameworks.

crimedaleyFor Mystery & Detective Fiction, for instance, I start with some comments about the (vexed, contested, elusive, perhaps nonexistent) difference between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction,” and some thoughts about how our ideas and expectations about these kinds of fiction affect our reading strategies. I also give an overview of the development of mystery fiction as a genre, from Newgate and gothic fiction through sensation fiction and Sherlock Holmes and on to the present day, with attention to the emergence of a wide range of subgenres; and I talk a bit about the history of policing, from thief-takers to Scotland Yard. For courses on Victorian fiction, I often lead off with some discussion about the contemporary connotations of “Victorian,” then talk about the historical and literary-historical reasons for those stereotypes; then I go over some generalizations about the “rise of the novel,” with some attention to social contexts and some to formal or thematic trends.

I’m always very aware when I put these introductory lessons together that they are, inevitably, in some ways artificial and inadequate. I usually say so eventually, too, noting that every generalization I offer, every master-narrative I string together, could itself be the starting point for a complex and nuanced exploration of details. But I still believe that we need some sense of a (not the) big picture, just to get oriented. I also think good reading does rely to some extent on having the relevant knowledge: to give another example from my own recent teaching, I don’t think it’s possible to read A Room of One’s Own really well if you don’t know anything about the history of women’s education and where to place A Room of One’s Own in that story. It’s not that you wouldn’t get anything out of your reading without knowing these things, but aspects of your understanding would necessarily be superficial. So that’s a context I make sure we address in class.woolf

I doubt there was ever a time when every student arrived in any given class with all the “right” equipment: setting things up, or filling them in, has always been one of a teacher’s jobs, along with drawing semi-arbitrary lines around what’s relevant and what’s not. It’s a good thing that we’ve gotten more self-conscious about how and why we do this and why it is also a way of making things up, but I expect most of us still do some version of it, laying the groundwork we want everyone to have for our purposes. In my department, we used to do more of this structurally, through course requirements and prerequisites. This has become less and less possible, however, both because of the way our mandate has grown (despite what some conservative bobble-heads might think, the expansion of literary studies has been additive — it’s not that we teach comic books instead of Shakespeare or vampire movies instead of Beowulf but that, resources permitting, we do it all!) and because students seem to like requirements less and less. (I think the two developments are related, actually: the more it’s clear they could reasonably study, the less reasonable it seems for us to require them to study anything in particular.)

nortonIf our curriculum currently has an organizing principle or direction, it’s more skills-oriented rather than content-oriented: first-year classes emphasize reading strategies and writing skills, then for majors and Honors students we have kinds of required classes (literature surveys and theory / methods) that they choose among. There are some breadth requirements, for historical range, but because they can take classes in pretty much any order they want, none of this provides any predictability or consistency. And so I try to build it in myself.

I’m curious what other people’s experiences have been with this sort of problem — or whether it even seems to you like a problem! Maybe other teachers just show up and jump right in, or maybe students would rather learn as they go, or make do with what they already know, and never mind the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything, even as a provisional framework. If you’re a professor, how does your department deal with the question of “coverage,” or of sequencing, or have you done more or less what we’ve done, that is, let the diversity of material become a smorgasbord of options for students? Viewed that way, I think our offerings are pretty tempting — they are both nutritious and delicious! And mostly I am glad about that, about their variety and inclusiveness and even idiosyncrasy, because that’s the reality of our field. We contain multitudes! For the first week or so of every term, though, I struggle with the pedagogical implications of what we have become.

“Not Simple Enough”: Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

nortonportrait

“You seem to have so many scruples, so many reasons, so many ties. When I discovered, ten years ago, that my husband’s dearest wish was to make me miserable — of late he has simply let me alone — ah, it was a wonderful simplification! My poor Isabel, you’re not simple enough.”

I had barely finished reading The Portrait of a Lady when I learned that I had read the wrong book — the wrong version of this book, that is. Immediately following the novel’s last page in my Norton Critical Edition is a “Textual Appendix” itemizing all of James’s revisions between the first edition (1880-81) and the 1908 edition used as the main text for the Norton edition. “Even though more recent critics have acknowledged the revisions to be an improvement,” says my editor, “and numerous editors have tacitly concurred by reprinting the later version, dissenting voices have been raised.” The extensive catalog of textual variants is, in turn, followed by three critical commentaries on the issue of James’s revisions. Here are some excerpts from Nina Baym’s “Revision and Thematic Change in The Portrait of a Lady,” which is the essay that made me wish I’d read the original 1881 version of Portrait instead of the “improved” New York edition:

The revised version is stylistically and thematically closer to his later interests than the early one had been. Its writing is more complex, mannered, and metaphorical. It is thematically less timely and realistic, for its main concern is the private consciousness. In the 19o8 version, Isabel Archer’s inner life is the center of the character and of the novel’s reality. In the early version the inner life is only one aspect of character, which is defined by behavior in a social context. . . .

The 1881 novel was one of an increasing number of works about “the woman question.” The heroine, an appealing young American, wants to live an independent and meaningful life; but she is thwarted. Unlike many works of the period on this theme, The Portrait did not depict Isabel’s desire as unnatural and misguidedly unfeminine, nor did it employ the standard formula of saving her from this delusion by love and marriage. On the contrary, the novel sympathized with her aim to the point of calling both love and marriage into question. . . . The changes of 1908, transforming the story into a drama of consciousness, overlaid and in places obliterated the coherence of the 1881 versions.

Now, I admit I did not patiently follow all of Baym’s specific arguments about particular revisions, or work through the 80 (yes, 80) pages of them for myself — I’m trusting Baym’s overall claim, which suggests (though she doesn’t quite put it this way) that James’s revisions transformed The Portrait of a Lady from a Victorian novel to a modern(ist) one. It’s not that I actively disliked the novel I read, but the 1881 novel she describes is one that I would be eager to put in conversation with other novels I know about “the woman question,” most of which are not quite as formulaic as she suggests — Gissing’s The Odd Women, for instance (1893) certainly calls both love and marriage into question, and even much earlier novels from Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall through Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda offer little hope that marriage is a simple solution to women’s thwarted desires for meaningful lives.

oxfordportraitReading the 1908 Portrait, though, I had found myself wondering where we were supposed to be looking for the causes of Isabel’s catastrophe — besides, of course, to Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle. I think we are implicitly directed to Isabel’s social context by her overpowering sense of what is expected, of what convention demands. But given the greater freedom experienced — socially and emotionally — by so many of those around her, I think we have to conclude that it’s her own sense of duty, her own insistence on what she believes to be honor, that ultimately condemns her. There is something Eliot-like in this, to be sure: what is Dorothea’s obligation to Casaubon, after all, if not an expression of her strong sense of duty and her individual principles, which make betrayal of trust an abomination to her? But James’s attention to the external conditions of Isabel’s life is much less detailed and explicit, and he tells us next to nothing about its historical antecedents: Isabel’s moral dilemma seems much more abstract than any moral crisis Eliot confronts us with. Further, it is difficult  (or was for me, anyway) to discern any principle which James thinks ought to guide Isabel: that inhibition about moving from is to ought (as I think Martha Nussbaum would agree) is characteristic of James, and for some that is part of his appeal, but for me it feels like a loss — or, more accurately, like an artful reticence, as all the emotional weight of the novel’s final chapters surely presses us to feel Isabel’s return to Osmond as a fatal error. Her horror at openly breaking a vow she has made is not supported by anything else in the novel — another way in which the novel’s moral operations differ from Eliot’s, as the true crises in her work usually turn on competing goods, not unmoored error.

In any case, this version of Portrait seemed to me very much a psychological rather than a social novel, a “drama of consciousness,” as Baym says, and while I was often impressed, even overwhelmed, at the subtlety of James’s analysis of motive and perspective, I also found it frequently oppressive: I missed the balance Eliot gives us between the individual and the community, the particular and the general, the instance and the abstraction. Though I hesitate to align myself with the Countess, when I came to her wry comment to Isabel that she wasn’t “simple enough,” I thought: that’s it! that’s the problem with the whole book! It is so subtle — and is life (life as lived, that is, rather than life imagined) anything like that? If we thought that scrupulously about every little thing — if we strove to be, as James  urges in “The Art of Fiction,” “one of the people on whom nothing is lost” — not a nuance, not even a shade of a nuance — we’d never be able to get out of bed in the morning. As I argued in much more painstaking detail in my essay on “Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Life of Middlemarch,” “the reason James’s psychological realism should not satisfy us in our efforts to decide how we should live is that ultimately morality lies in action.” To which, of course, a reasonable response is not only that we are under no obligation to read in the service of morality but that James has no obligation to help us be moral…but the more general point remains: that at many points while reading Portrait I wished for a “wonderful simplification.”

And yet perhaps the earlier version would have given me hardly more satisfaction. Here’s Horace Scudder writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1882 (and thus, obviously, about the 1881 text):

penguinportraitWhat renders [James’s method] distinct from, say, Thackeray’s method, with which it has been compared, or from George Eliot’s, is the limitation of the favorite generalizations and analyses. If the reader will attend, he will see that these take place quite exclusively within the boundaries of the story and characters. That is to say, when the people in the book stop acting or speaking, it is to give the novelist an opportunity, not to indulge in general reflections, having applications to all sorts and conditions of men, of whom his dramatis personae are but a part, — he has no desire to share humanity with them, — but to make acute reflections upon these particular people, and to explain more thoroughly than their words and acts can the motives which lie behind. . . .

[His work] is consistent, but the consistency is with itself. . . . This self-consistency is a separate thing from any consistency with the world of reality. . . . In Andersen’s quaint story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, a little child discovers the unreality of the gossamer dress, and his voice breaks in upon the illusion from the outer world. Something of the same separation from the story, of the same unconscious naturalness of feeling, prompts the criticism that, though these people walk, and sit, and talk, and behave, they are yet in an illusionary world of their own.

I’m sure nice Mr. Scudder doesn’t mean that when you break the illusion, James’s work is exposed as naked pretension rather than art! Indeed, he’s quite admiring about what it’s like to be inside James’s world. I admire it too: the scene in which the Countess tells Isabel the truth is thrilling, for instance, both because of its psychological acuity and because we’ve waited so long for the dramatic irony to reach its climax, for the gap between our knowledge (and suspicions) and Isabel’s to close. The farewell with Ralph, too, has all the emotional intensity of Dorothea’s climactic visit to Rosamond at the end of Middlemarch, though its revelations and effects could hardly be more different. It may be that we feel moments like this — which are the closest the novel comes to dramatic action — particularly deeply because we have spent so long dissecting and analyzing: at last, there is blood.

In the end (though as always it’s a conclusion that reveals as much about me as about either James or his novel) I sympathize most with Margaret Oliphant’s verdict on The Portrait of a Lady:

It is far too long, infinitely ponderous, and pulled out of all proportion by the elaboration of every detail; but there is scarcely a page in it that is not worked out with the utmost skill and refinement, or which the reader will pass over without leaving something to regret — that is, if he has leisure for the kind of reading which is delightful for its own sake in complete independence of its subject. . . . But nothing so elaborate ever could be real, and the dazzle sometimes fatigues, though the effect is one which cannot be contemplated without admiration.

As she too was contemplating the 1881 version, that probably sets me straight about whether I did in fact read the wrong version: it would not have made a difference, or at any rate not much difference, if I hadn’t read the “more complex, mannered, and metaphorical” 1908 version. The difference is a matter of degree, not of kind. Where does that leave me? Stumped, as usual, I think, by James’s own point (again, in “The Art of Fiction”) that “there are all sorts of tastes,” and mine aren’t altogether Jamesian.

Happy New Year! and New Books! and New OLM!

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Books2016

2016 is getting off to a good start in my corner of the world. For one thing, I have a lovely array of new books, thanks to the kind people who basically ran my entire Chapters wish list. Isn’t that an enticing stack? My problem now is that I can’t decide where to start: rereading Mr. Impossible, because I know how fun that will be? rereading Little Women, because I finally have my own elegant edition? embarking on Jane Smiley’s ‘100 Years’ trilogy? plunging into Fates and Furies? wandering New York with Vivian Gornick? I suppose I could postpone the decision by settling down to finish The Portrait of a Lady — not least because I don’t want to read The House of Mirth until I’ve done that.

It’s not just the beginning of a new year, of course: it’s also the beginning of the month, and that means, as always, that a new issue of Open Letters Monthly has just gone live. I’m in it a couple of times: in brief in our feature of most-anticipated books of 2016,and at greater length in an essay about different editions of Middlemarch that is also a review of the elegant new Penguin Classics Deluxe edition. I’m always wary of writing autobiographically, but I couldn’t think how else to approach this review, and I enjoyed reflecting on the versions of the novel I’ve accumulated over the years as well as on how the editions we read of a book affect the relationship we develop with it.

oxfordlawrenceAs usual, the issue includes a wide range of other interesting pieces. One of my favorites this time is Dorian’s essay on D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. My own experience with Lawrence so far is limited and ambivalent — but it has certainly made me curious, and Dorian writes so eloquently about both the language and the ideas of Women in Love that I’m feeling emboldened to read more Lawrence before too long. My co-editor Robert Minto offers a fascinating essay on Nietzsche’s Anti-Education, recently reissued by NYRB Classics, finding in it strains that might serve as cautionary to today’s “anxious citizens of academia”; Steve Donoghue reviews (as only he can) a new book on Sigismondo Malatesta, the only man ever to be reverse-canonized; Barrett Hathcock explores the hall-of-mirrors sensation of finding himself fictionalized by a student in his own creative writing class; and that’s just the top half of the Table of Contents. I hope you’ll check it out, and if you like anything about what we produce every month at Open Letters, I also hope you’ll consider supporting our efforts — we are entirely sincere when we say that a comment or a link is as welcome as a donation.

Very soon, I will also be launched on the new term. My classes this time are familiar ones in my teaching rotation: Mystery and Detective Fiction and 19th-Century British Fiction (Austen to Dickens edition). As usual, I’m feeling equal parts anticipation and dread at the prospect of starting it all up again. (I have already had one very typical anxiety dream in which I was unable to print notes or handouts because my files had disappeared, and the computer kept auto-updating as I desperately tried to find them, and the start time for class came and went … you’d think after all these years I would not need my subconscious warning me to prepare for class, but this did prompt me to go to campus early and print all my notes and handouts for Monday, so that’s good, I guess!) I’m also feeling very aware that this time last year my sabbatical term was just beginning: inevitably, I guess, that is provoking some reflection on how I used that time and what has become of the projects I worked on since it ended — more about that eventually, along with more of my regular posts on how things go in my classes.

But I still have one more full day, and since I did print my materials early (and have also built my Blackboard sites and labelled my folders and made my Powerpoint slides for opening day), I will spend it reading — if I can just settle on which book. Happy New Year!

Novel Readings 2015

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

It’s time again to look back over my year in books and blogging. It was a good reading year overall, I think, with a number of real stand-outs and hardly any duds. Interestingly, it doesn’t look as if my sabbatical led to a great deal more reading than usual — for which I blame our mind-numbing, soul-destroying winter and our kitchen renovation, which (in their different ways) ate up a lot of whatever energy I had left after putting in my time on my research and writing projects. But reading “about as much as usual” isn’t too shabby, especially when so much of it is so good.

hildBook of the Year

I already identified Nicola Griffith’s Hild as my best reading experience of 2015 in our “Year in Reading” feature at Open Letters Monthly; I wrote about it at more length here. What lingers with me the most about this extraordinary novel is not its historical world-building (though given that I compared Griffith’s achievement in this respect to Dorothy Dunnett’s, you know how impressed I was!) but Hild herself: her characterization struck me as profoundly feminist, though nothing about her or her novel could ever be pointed to as didactic or even overtly political.

Other recent fiction I’m especially glad to have read

I read two other excellent novels featuring memorably complex, questing female protagonists — novels that were otherwise very different in both voice and context: Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman, and Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights. Much as I liked An Unnecessary Woman, it’s the quieter, but also more quietly moving, Brooklyn Heights that I find I still think about: it is particularly evocative about the wintry bleakness of loneliness, and about the ways exploring physical space can also be a way of exploring and maybe even expressing who we are.

doerrLike many other readers (though certainly not all), I loved Anthony Doerr’s elegant, fairy-tale-like World War II novel All the Light We Cannot See. And, a bit to my own surprise, I really liked Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, another critical favorite. I found the melodramatic conclusion somewhat over-plotted, but among all the new books I read this year it’s the one I keep thinking about teaching: I think it might go over very well in an intro class, perhaps juxtaposed with The Road. Students would find it engaging, and it would give us plenty to think and talk about.

“Enjoy” isn’t quite the right word for the experience of reading Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles, but I thought The Orphan Master’s Son was so extraordinary that I was eager to try it, and I’m glad I did: the stories in the collection are strange and bleak and funny and full of surprises — all without being flashy or overtly experimental.

Not strictly speaking “recent” but out recently in new editions are the two novels I read by Barbara Comyns: The Vet’s Daughter, and Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. There’s something a bit off about both of them, but in a good way: I always enjoy puzzling over fiction that doesn’t fit any of my own preconceived notions, and I’m looking forward to reading her equally odd-looking Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead.

Critical darlings that disappointed

lostchildDonna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is definitely in this category: it left me thoroughly underwhelmed. I was moderately more whelmed with the final volume in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels — but I never caught “Ferrante Fever,” and frankly, by the time I’d finished with The Story of the Lost Child, I had had quite enough of the whole phenomenon, which I have long suspected is as much about what (a certain population of) readers and critics are looking for from women writers as it does with the books themselves. (All reading, of course, is a complex interplay of text and context, including the reader’s personal complexes and desires, but sometimes things seem to tip particularly sharply in one direction or the other.) I was unmoved by Andre Alexis’s Giller Prize winner Fifteen Dogs, and I abhorred The Girl on the Train, which I wrote about for OLM’s always- entertaining “bestsellers” feature.

Classics and old favorites I happily revisited

The Victorian novel I had the most fun rereading this year was Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, which has more artful restraint but also more breadth than North and South (which is the novel of hers I know and like the best). I also really enjoyed rereading George Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentance,” which contributed a lot to my thinking about her treatment of religion and religious characters.

Some of the most fun I had blogging all year was with my two posts on Busman’s Honeymoon, one laying out the reasons I have always loved it, the other laying out all the reasons to be wary of it. It’s so important, I think, to acknowledge that these two kinds of responses can co-exist, that we can learn to critique without having to discard. Head and heart, as Sayers might say, must work together. Sometimes, of course, our perception of a book’s flaws may become so acute that our love cannot survive (I think that has happened to me with Gone with the Wind) — but I think it would be worse if we allowed our love to blind us to a work’s problems, or to drive us to deny them.

Another old favorite I greatly enjoyed both rereading and writing about was Margaret Campbell Barnes’s My Lady of Cleves – this is not historical fiction the way Hilary Mantel achieves it (or Nicola Griffith or Dorothy Dunnett either) but personal drama lovingly furnished with tapestries and eel pies.

Novel kinds of reading

understanding-comicsI made my first self-conscious foray into graphic fiction this year, reading both Maus and Persepolis, and also Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics — which taught me a lot about how to read this kind of book better. I don’t feel I quite “got” it, but it felt like progress to see what “it” might be like if I did. And I started listening to more books, which I enjoyed when I could find the right match between book, narrator, and opportunity.

Mysteries

This year I tried (again) and failed (again) to fall in love with Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series. It makes me feel like such a bad Canadian that I can’t get past her stilted writing! But I’m going to stop trying, because I read enough series as it is, and I started at least three this year that I’d like to continue with: Maurizio de Giovanni’s Commissario Ricciardi series, Arnaldur Indridason’s outstanding Inspector Erlendur novels, and Steve Burrows’s birding mysteries.

Romances

juliejamesAlthough I didn’t usually blog about them, I read — or at least started — quite a lot of romance novels this year. (As I have mentioned before, I tend to feel less committed to finishing these if I don’t like them right away, partly because I get most of them from the library, but also because I don’t have high expectations that persistence will pay off, as romances tend to be more consistent than transformative — which is a good thing if you like what you’re getting, of course). Among them, only new one really stood out, and that was Julie James’s Suddenly One Summer. I have quite enjoyed most of James’s other novels, particularly Practice Makes Perfect (which would make an excellent Hollywood rom-com, if anyone’s interested in doing the screenplay): her characters are smart, her dialogue is snappy, and things get pretty sexy with her heroes and heroines (who are always, annoyingly, extraordinarily good-looking). I’ve heard her books described as “brittle,” though, and I can see why; also, some of them tend towards “romantic suspense,” and I don’t particularly love “woman in jeopardy” plots. I liked Suddenly One Summer a lot, though. It’s quieter than her other ones, and rather than turning on fast plotting and sparks flying, it is about two people patiently building trust and finding love. The heroine is a divorce lawyer who suffers from debilitating anxiety attacks; she is always at work splitting families up, but bringing a family together for once helps her find new courage herself. For me, this one’s a keeper!

Memorable non-fiction

mwordTwo works of non-fiction that I read this year resonated powerfully with me for personal reasons: Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal (which is the present we should all probably have given someone we love this Christmas, but also probably shouldn’t, because it’s not very comfortable reading) and Emily White’s Lonely. Somewhat less anxiety-inducing, often sad, sometimes funny, and always thought-provoking was Kerry Clare’s wonderful collection The ‘M’ Word, which explores many facets of motherhood, most of them quite unlike the more sentimental cliches our culture surrounds us with.

Unfinished business

I’m still working my way through The Portrait of a Lady, which is not a book I can concentrate on easily with the hum of family activity in the background. The two posts I’ve written on it so far do show that I’m making progress, though, not just on moving through the pages but on coming to terms with James’s style, which initially irritated me but now (mostly) just interests me.

The inevitable meta-blogging

My interest in blogging about blogging has gone down over time, but I did pause to reflect on how things were looking for “intelligent bloggy bookchat by scholars,” as John Holbo once optimistically championed, and then to add some afterthoughts based on my own further reflections and the responses I got.

Blogging my teaching

I kept up my series ‘This Week In My Classes,” which now (after so many years in which I often teach the same classes, albeit in different variations) has become less a chronicle of what we read or talked about and more an occasion to reflect on broader issues about pedagogy, such as what it’s like to be a beginner or how, as teachers, we can learn to let go. I still find this exercise useful, and I’m always gratified when other people tell me that they appreciate it too. I’m reasonably certain that there is no one right way to do any of the things that professors do in or out of the classroom: this is at once the best and the worst thing about this part of our job! It’s impossible to be complacent: we can only get more confident about trying things and seeing how they go, knowing that we can always tweak them next time.

Appearing elsewhere

godinruinsMost of my published writing appeared, as usual, here and at Open Letters Monthly — where, in addition to the pieces already mentioned, I reviewed Kate Atkinson’s very good but also very annoying A God in Ruins, Diana Souhami’s 100% annoying Gwendolen, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s initially empowering but ultimately (you guessed it) profoundly annoying Big Magic. But an essay I wrote on faith and fellowship in Middlemarch appeared in Berfrois, and my review of Samantha Walton’s Guilty But Insane appeared in the TLS: these are both publications I was very happy about.

Books I’m especially looking forward to reading in 2016

So many! But near the top of the pile is Emma (not just because everyone’s reading it for its 200th birthday, but partly because all the interesting things they are saying about it are inspiring), along with Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. My Christmas books include Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, Jane Smiley’s Some Luck, and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, all very tempting. I’ve got Alaa Al Aswany’s The Automobile Club of Egypt waiting as well, and somehow I’m certain more titles will accumulate as the year goes on.

Thank you to everyone who read and commented at Novel Readings this year!

“Life is Never Absent”: May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

mrs-stevens-hears-the-mermaids-singingIn her 1974 introduction to Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, Carolyn Heilbrun comments on how little “organized acclamation” or “academic attention” May Sarton has received. I was curious to see if that had changed in the intervening decades, so I did a quick subject search on the MLA Bibliography and turned up 108 results since 1974 — which is within hailing distance of George Eliot’s (surprisingly modest) 117 results for the same time frame, much better than Winifred Holtby’s 36, but far from Virginia Woolf’s startling 5147. Sarton’s star has risen, then, at least a little.

I’m almost as interested in Heilbrun’s interest in Sarton as I am in Sarton herself. Heilbrun clearly found something in Sarton that mattered to her, and thus she became her reader, her critic, and her advocate. She works hard to understand and go beyond strains of conventionality in Sarton’s novels, and particularly in Sarton’s ideas about women and women’s work, and to articulate what it is, despite Sarton’s formal limitations, that gives her work such speaking force. In this introduction, for instance, Heilbrun praises Sarton’s compassion:

Louise Bogan, in a letter to Rush Limmer, calls some poems of Sarton’s “sentimental,” an easy charge, a palpable danger to any writer not barricaded against revelation. But what appears sentimental to the society Mrs. Stevens envisioned as composed of male critics is an inevitable aspect of the compassion which, in Sarton, has never cowered behind the usual defenses. As a result, life is never absent from her work as it is from, to name a master, the work of Flaubert. And even Bogan must have understood something of this. Writing of Elizabeth Bowen’s crystalline and pristine prose, never for a moment lax or sentimental, Bogan observed, “The Death of the Heart is too packed, too brilliant, for its own good. What Miss Bowen lacks is a kind of humility.”

I was struck by how these comments actually bring us back to what I was puzzling over in my last post: the relationship between a certain kind of artistic excellence and a quality of what, in Heilbrun’s terms, might be called lifelessness. Another way to think about it, building on Bogan’s word “humility,” might be that Sarton comes across as a writer trying to figure things out, whereas Flaubert or James seem so sure of themselves — an effect that of course is the result of effort, not ease. There is intellectual excitement as well as beauty in their achieved confidence, but there’s something appealing in a different way in Sarton’s awkwardness — a quality that (in my limited experience, at least) is more apparent in her fiction, as if when writing memoir some obstacle (psychological, formal, whatever) melts away and she finds her own kind of writerly certainty.

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing is actually a lot like a memoir: it’s hard not to read the story of novelist and poet Hilary Stevens reflecting — through the device of an interview — on her life’s work as a version of Sarton’s own story, as an attempt to dramatize questions she had thought a lot about regarding creativity and love. I think I might have found it more engaging if I were a creative writer myself: as it is, I have little idea what the relationship between a poet and her “muse” might be, and I care a lot more about the results! Still, I was quite interested in Hilary’s comments on poetic form:

Inspiration? It felt more like being harnessed to wild horses whom she must learn to control or be herself flung down and broken. The sonnet form with its implacable demand to clarify, to condense, to bring to fulfillment, became the means to control. Now for the first time she understood about form, what it was for, how it could teach one to discover what was really happening, and now to come to terms with the impossible, how it was not a discipline imposed from outside by the intellect, but grappled with from inner necessity as a means of probing and dealing with powerful emotions.

But what I liked best here, as in Plant Dreaming Deep or Journal of a Solitude, is Sarton’s ability (or, perhaps, her willingness) to convey the vitality of a single person: a person alone in her own space, observing it closely but also filling it with her thoughts and memories; a person deeply, persistently, without self-satisfaction, simply being herself. “You’ve given me courage,” says Jenny Hale, one of the interviewers and herself an aspiring writer, near the end of the visit: “courage to be myself, to do what I want to do!” “How did I do that, I wonder?” asks Hilary. “Maybe –” replies Jenny, “maybe because you have dared so greatly to be your self.” It doesn’t sound like much, to be your self, but it is a lot, isn’t it? And it’s hard to do, especially among other people who inevitably, often quite legitimately, make their own explicit or implicit demands on who you can be. Sarton’s fascination with being alone is tied to this sense that solitude brings (albeit at a cost) a certain freedom otherwise inaccessible — perhaps especially for women.

Henry James and “le mot juste”

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

nortonportraitI feel I owe Henry James a bit of an apology. In my previous post on The Portrait of a Lady I complained that his sentences were irritating. Yet, as several people commented at the time, they really aren’t, or, not much, not in Portrait. (Of course, it’s also possible that, as Dorian predicted, I have become accustomed to their cadence, but Portrait is early enough in his oeuvre that I think it is partly that the worst was yet to come — a theory which my memory of reading The Golden Bowl confirms.) Now that I’m back to the novel again, what I find myself making note of are not places where I tripped over stuttering syntax but moments where I let out a small sigh of satisfaction: that, yes, that word (or phrase or, especially, metaphor) exactly. A few samples:

A young gentlewoman without visible relations had always struck her as a flower without foliage.

To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past.

Every now and then Isabel heard the Countess, at something said by her companion, plunge into the latter’s lucidity as a poodle splashes after a thrown stick.

She mightn’t be inhaled as a rose, but she might be grasped as a nettle.

The flower of her youth had not faded, it only hung more quietly on its stem.

It’s Flaubert, of course, who’s most associated (as far as I know, anyway) with the relentless search for “let mot juste,” and Flaubert is the last writer I can remember reading who provoked this kind of appreciation for his thrillingly precise yet somehow unexpected details. James was a fan of Flaubert, whom he called “a novelist’s novelist,” and both are known as key figures in the aestheticization of fiction, so this similarity isn’t surprising.

Thinking of James and Flaubert together, both writers I can admire but don’t really like, makes me wonder if these marvelous details are symptoms of the problem — my problem, that is. In his essay “How Flaubert Changed Literature Forever,” James Wood discusses Flaubert’s comments on “the monstrous difficulty of writing a sentence. “Style had always been a battle for novelists,” Wood says, “but Flaubert, in his letters at least, turned it into a perpetual defeat.” His writing becomes a site of struggle for a particular kind of perfection, a struggle which is part of how the novel becomes self-consciously artistic and thus great. And yet, Wood proposes, “under Flaubert … the novel’s great expansion was perhaps an expansion into limit”:

When the nineteenth-century novel became madly ambitious to be everything, it began to chastise itself for failing to do everything. Taking everything as its only measure, it became afflicted with a sense of its failure, and began to throw off those ambitions, like a plane dumping fuel, until only one was left: its very essence, style itself. Until Flaubert, the novel had been mithridated in its own unself-consciousness, as an alcoholic thoughtlessly medicates himself; but Flaubert took away its sweet, ignorant poisons.

As so often with Wood, and with any generalization about “the” nineteenth-century novel, I am not entirely comfortable with this account of literary history. Certainly not every novelist threw off every ambition but style — only the novelists in whom Wood takes a particular interest. And Wood’s own metaphors are so hopelessly biased against the novelists who aren’t Flaubert-like in their repudiation of the “ignorant poisons” of everything besides style! I do like Wood’s phrase “an expansion into limit”: it’s just that for me, what he interprets as a sign of progress feels to me, as the reader I am, like a loss, a decline. There’s something claustrophobic about this highly-crafted prose that never rushes, that’s never excitable, that sculpts and places and polishes its pieces so perfectly. I don’t concede that other 19th-century novel(ist)s are formless, but their forms are not (or, not just) verbal, not just stylistic but also spatial, not singular but plural.

It’s absurd, of course, to call James’s prose a “decline,” and in any case I don’t actually want to fall into Wood’s habit of identifying a favorite kind of novel as the best kind: as James himself said (in his Preface to The Portrait of a Lady) “the house of fiction has not one window, but a million.”  I just find myself wishing James would open his window up a bit wider and let some air in! But if you’re that self-conscious, I suppose you can’t take a risk that an errant breeze will shuffle your papers or, worse, carry in some sweet but destructive — that is, distracting — poison. Is oxygen really too high a price to pay for le mot juste?