Two Iranian Women’s Memoirs: Things I’ve Been Silent About and Iran Awakening

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

I read both Things I’ve Been Silent About and Iran Awakening a few weeks ago, inspired in part by the discussions with one of my students mentioned here–she also very kindly gave me her copy of Iran Awakening when I mentioned I had not been able to find it in stock locally. I’m not entirely sure why I have put off writing about them for so long! But until I do, I can’t put the books back on the shelf, so here I go.

I had a passing idea that I would, maybe should, reread Reading Lolita in Tehran before writing on Nafisi’s memoir, but I didn’t. Perhaps if I had, I would have more to say about Things I Have Been Silent About, which I didn’t actually find very engaging. It’s primarily about Nafisi’s relationship with her parents, which wasn’t what I wanted to know about. I also felt uncomfortable reading her account of them, particularly of her vexed relationship with her mother. Though she is self-conscious about her own failures to understand or sympathize with her mother, and works to contextualize her mother’s choices and values, she ultimately still comes across as both unsympathetic and resentful. I guess I’m just wary of the inevitable one-sidedness of such a personal account, and wince at exposure of family feelings in this way. Consider the tone of this passage:

Some families try to cover up their tensions in front of strangers, but for Mother, a woman otherwise so insistent on social etiquette, no such niceties existed. She gave in to her emotions regardless of where she was. I tried not to let her know about my interest in Mehran, but she had a hunter’s instinct, alert and sensitized to my secret hideaways. Her instinct was helped, in this instance, by daily intrusions into the most private corners of her children’s lives. She listened in on my phone conversations, read my letters and diaries, and walked in and out of my room whenever she felt like it. I could never be certain which I resented more, the fact that she read my diary and letters or that she never allowed me to feel indignant about her actions: she would use her new evidence as proof of my betrayals.

Sure, Mother sounds intrusive–any teenager would find her so. But Nafisi seems to be still caught up in the resentment she describes. She’s far more forgiving of her father’s infidelities than she is of her mother’s transgressions. In fact, she gets angry at her mother about them, as here, when her mother befriends one of Father’s mistresses:

It irritated me, the innocent and persistent way my mother had of being attentive toward this woman and her family. It made us all uncomfortable, since we all knew what was going on. . .

To some extent Things That I Have Been Silent About does trace a process of reconciliation for them, and the book ends, after the death of both parents, with some touching reflections on what–almost despite themselves, you get the impression–her parents have left her with, “a portable home that safeguards memory and is a constant resistance against the tyranny of man and of time.” But as I read the book, I wanted to get away from Nafisi’s own perspective on them–which of course is a desire that goes against the grain of a memoir.

Shirin Ebadi’s story is intrinsically interesting, even inspiring. The oddity of Iran Awakening, for me, was that the book does not perform that inspiration. If anything, it consistently downplays the drama of Ebadi’s confrontations with the Islamic Republic. Individual chapters often open with appalling anecdotes of injustice and brutality against women and children, like the story of 11-year old Leila Fathi, raped, beaten, and discarded. Two of the three perpetrators are convicted and sentenced to death (a third hangs himself in prison).

In this instance, the judge ruled that the ‘blood money’ for the two men was worth more than the life of the murdered eleven-year-old girl, and he demanded that her family come up with thousands of dollars to finance their executions.

Leila’s father sold all of his worldly possessions, including the little clay hut where his family slept. Homeless but convinced that they would at least reclaim their honor, they offered the money to the court. It was not enough. The family took to sleeping at the shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini, a vast mausoleum on the road to Qom, while trying to raise the reminaing cash. First Leila’s father volunteered to sell a kidney, but his organ was rejected because of his past drug abuse. Next Leila’s brother offered his up, but the doctor refused because he was handicapped by polio. [Remember, they are doing this to raise money to pay for the legal sentence to be carried out on the men who raped and murdered their daughter!] ‘Why,’ asked the doctor, ‘are you two so insistent on selling your kidneys?’ Out poured the tale. They could not return to their village, they explained, stained by tthe shame of Leila’s rape. [their shame?!] Family honor rests on the virtue of women, and nothing less than the perpetrator’s execution could erase their shame.

As Ebadi remarks, this case is evidence that the ‘postrevolutionary legal system’ is not just flawed but ‘effectively pathological’; she agrees to represent the family. But things get worse, not better:

Over the course of the proceedings, the court acquitted both defendants [though there’s at least one eye-witness, Leila’s male cousin], overturned the acquittals, and then relaunched the investigation. The family’s grief slowly descended into madness. Leil’as mother took to sitting outside the courthouse in a white funeral shroud, holding a placard that described her daughter’s violation. During one trial, she threatened to set herself on fire, and began screaming profanities at the court. As though the whole proceeding was not dramatic enough, the judge held her in contempt of court and filed legal charges against her that took us weeks of mediation to settle.

The case, she tells us, “remains open to this day.” The whole scenario is so outrageous I found it difficult to sit still just reading about it, and along with Ebadi’s other examples, it more than makes her case about the “pathological” system. What I found disappointing was her understated treatment of her own courageous commitment to fighting for the rights of women and children. “While I was arguing Leila’s case,” she says, “the judge repeatedly accused me of speaking against Islam and its sacred laws.” She doesn’t detail either those accusations or her responses, either here or elsewhere by and large, though surely those exchanges exemplify the conflict between an evil state and those it oppresses, something more elaborate reconstruction of the debates would have dramatized. The prose of the book overall is just prosaic, even flat at times, considering the events it describes. But then, though Ebadi is clearly heroic, her heroism was always on behalf of other people, and of principles: if she spent the book grandstanding about herself, it would draw our attention to her performance rather than to the issues and people she fought for. The incidents and details she does provide, too, including her stay in Evin prison, are dramatic enough not to need a lot of heightened rhetoric.

Of particular interest to me were the sections discussing her decision to “draw on Islamic principles and precedents in Islamic law” in fighting her reformist battles. She is explicit and eloquent about her own conviction that the right and best option is a secular state: fundamentally,” she points out, “Islam, like any religion, is subject to interpretation,” and thus “there will never be a definitive resolution. . . . I am a lawyer by training, and know only too well the permanent limitations of trying to enshrine inalienable rights in sources that lack fixed terms and definitions.” She talks about ijtihad, the tradition within Islam of “intellectual interpretation and innovation” advocated by, among others, my own former UBC classmate Irshad Manji:

On the one hand, ijtihad imposes flexibility on Islamic law and creates an exciting space for adapting Islamic values and traditions to our lives in the modern world. But this flexibility is also precisely what makes ijtihad, and Islamic jurisprudence altogether, a tricky foundation on which to base inalienable, universal rights. Ijtihad frees us by removing the burden of definitiveness–we can interpret and reinterpret Koranic teachings forever; but it also means clerics can take the Universal Declaration of Human Rights home and argue about it richly for centuries. It means it is possible for everyone, always, to have a point. It means that patriarchal men and powerful authoritarian regimes who repress in the name of Islam can exploit ijtihad to interpret Islam in the regressive, unforgiving manner that suits their sensibilities and political agendas. As with the mullah who summoned his clerk and removed me from the floor of parliament, fighting for women’s rights in the Islamic Republic is often not a battle of wits or reason, nor is it always a fair fight. This does not mean that Islam and equal rights for women are incompatible; it means that invoking Islam in a theocracy refracts the religion through a kaleidoscope, with interpretations perpetually shifting and mingling and the vantage of the most powerful prevailing.

But she’s a pragmatist, and recognizing also the “permanent limitations” of her own position as a “citizen of the Islamic Republic,” she resolves to “advocate for female equality in an Islamic framework.” She has taken criticism from all sides for her decision:

I have been under attack most of my adult life for this approach, threatened by those in Iran who denounce me as an apostate for daring to suggest that Islam can look forward and denounced outside my country by secular critics of the Islamic Republic, whose attitudes are no less dogmatic. Over the years, I have endured all manner of slights and attacks, been told that I must not appreciate or grasp the real spirit of democracy if I can claim in the same breath that freedom and human rights are not perforce in conflict with Islam. When I heard the statement of the [Nobel] prize read aloud, heard my religion mentioned specifically alongside my work defending Iranians’ rights, I knew at that moment what was being recognized: the belief in a positive interpretation of Islam, and the power of that belief to aid Iranians who aspire to peacefully transform their country.

I admit, it was a problem for me to read about her arguments that, for example, male consent need not be given for divorce, not because of the inequities created by that requirement, but because the Shar-e Lomeh or Shia Textbook of Jurisprudence, does not explicitly require it. She works hard drafting a law to broaden women’s rights basing it “on the central texts taught in the holy city of Qom’s seminaries, showing that a basic right for women could be guaranteed within an Islamic framework of governance, provided [she concedes] those in government were inclined to interpret the faith in the spirit of equality.” My own view would be that women’s rights are not conditional on the inclinations of men or mullahs, and even as I am overwhelmed with admiration for Ebadi’s courage and accomplishments, it’s difficult for me to accept her strategic concessions precisely because, as she herself argues so elqouently, arguing for the compatibility of women’s rights “within an Islamic framework” is no guarantee at all because they can always be argued away again–really, arguing at all about the validity of women’s rights in the first place basically gives the game away. Though, as Ebadi’s memoir (like Nafisi’s) makes clear (as if it needed clarification), the Islamic Republic violates the human rights of all of its citizens, it’s women on whom the heavy hand of the state always falls the hardest– Ebadi remarks, “Reza Shah was the first, but not the last, Iranian ruler to act out a political agenda . . . on the frontier of women’s bodies.” The current case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, currently under sentence of death by stoning for alleged adultery, is just one appalling recent example. (Both Nafisi and Ebadi are signatories on the petition to free Sakineh; if you aren’t already, follow the link and add your name.) As Ebadi would have to concede, Sakineh’s trial and sentence reflect an interpretation of Islam–just not the one that guarantees “a basic right for women,” thus proving her point about the need to base “inalienable rights” on a different foundation. But, of course, that’s easy for me to say. Nobody’s going to put me in prison for it.

Florence Nightingale, Letters from Egypt

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Having cleared at least the semblance of a path through the draft thesis chapters that have taken up the bulk of my time since my summer class wrapped up at the end of June, I’m finally turning my attention back to my summer research project, which is to extend and perhaps even complete the essay on Ahdaf Soueif that I’ve posted about here and at The Valve before. Yes, that’s right, it’s not done yet. It got as far as a conference paper last year, and since then, in between other projects, I’ve been collecting references and sources for it and trying to conceptualize what it is I hope that the final essay will do, or be about and where exactly I might submit it. My basic idea is to fill in more details about In the Eye of the Sun and then develop a comparison between it and The Map of Love–which I’ve just finished re-re-reading. The Map of Love has a more complex form than In the Eye of the Sun, interweaving the story of two 20th-century women (Isabel, an American, and Amal, an Egyptian who turns out to be Isabel’s cousin) with the story of Lady Anna Winterbourne, an Edwardian Englishwoman who travels to–and eventually marries and lives in–Egypt. While my motivating interest is still the intertextual relationship between Soueif’s work and George Eliot’s, The Map of Love clearly has strong ties to other literary sources, particularly accounts of “lady travellers” in Egypt. Lucie Duff Gordon is probably the most famous, but I’ve also signed out of the library a lovely illustrated edition of Florence Nightingale’s Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-50, which turns out to be quite entertaining. For instance, like me she wages war on biting insects:

I and the gnats have so many ways of outwitting each other. X and Mr B. look as if they had the small-pox; but I, who would sleep in an Indian rubber tub with a tallow candle in my mouth if it were suggested, shut my windows before sundown; and I hear those who are in, furling their wings and uttering little infernal cries of triumph. Then I set my door open, and put a light in the passage, and they think I’m there, and follow; but I’m not,–don’t tell them. Then, when night comes, I take out a large sheet of paper and begin to write, and they believe I’m not thinking of sleep. But I leave off in the middle of a word, run with all my might at the Levinge [an elaborate netted sleeping bag], where I insert myself by so small a hole that you would say a camel could get through the eye of a needle; and then I clap my hands, and sing a little ode in honour of Mercury, the god of theft, because I have stolen myself from the gnats. Meanwhile I hear their whistle of rage and disappointment, and I see their proboscises coming through the curtains, as if they would fly away with the whole concern.

In a more serious vein, she often reflects on what she perceives of “Mahometism.” Carefully fitted up in “Egyptian dress,” including a complete veil, for instance, she is able to step inside a mosque to observe:

That quarter of an hour seemed to reveal to one what it is to be a woman in these countries, where Christ has not been to raise us. God save them, for it is a hopeless life. . . . Still, the mosque struck me with a pleasant feeling; X was struck with its irreverence. Some were at their prayers; but one was making baskets, another was telling Arabian Night stories to a whole group of listeners, sitting round him–others were asleep. I am much more struck with the irreverence of a London church.

It is so pleasant to see a place where any man may go for a moment’s quiet, and there is none to find fault with him, nor make him afraid. Here the homeless finds a home, the weary repose, the busy leisure,–if I could have said where any woman may go for an hour’s rest, to me the feeling would have been perfect,–perfect at least compared with the streets of London and Edinburgh, where there is not a spot on earth a poor woman may call her own to find repose in. The mosque leaves the more religious impression of the two, it is the better place of worship,–not than St. Peter’s, perhaps, but better than St. Paul’s.

I don’t know why it surprised me, from the author of Cassandra, after all, but I was struck by how often her interest and enjoyment in the scenes she observes are undercut, or at least rendered more problematic, by her consciousness of her sex and the complications it brings:

We have had a delightful week at Cairo. I wish we were going to stay longer. It is the riding in the streets, above all, which is so delightful, of which one never wearies; the latticed windows meeting overhead, the pearls of Moorish architecture at every corner, the looking up to the blue sky and golden sunlight from the wells of streets and in the bazaars, the streets entirely roofed in; and as you stand bargaining for a pair of yellow slippers, you see the corner of a street with the spring of an arch covered with Moorish network, and the sunlight pouring through the square holes left in the roof which shuts in the street. . .

In riding home by moonlight, … there is not a corner which is not a picture; and no picture can give an idea of the colouring. But you don’t enjoy all this for nothing. A Christian female dog has two titles of dishonour here, and she cannot stir out without her ass, her running ass-driver, and at least one gentleman or a dragoman. A la langue this dependence becomes tiresome beyond what a European can conceive. It is not that one minds being spat at (which I have been) for a religion which one loves, but one is so afraid of the gentlemen of one’s party noticing any insult, as an Englishman’s complaint would bring a bastinado upon the poor wretch, which has often ended in death.

Like Soueif’s Lady Anna, she is particularly fascinated and spiritually moved by the desert. “The oftener you are astonished at it, the more like a stranger a mysterious power it seems,” she remarks;

While the earth in our country is rich and variegated with light, and crowded with animation, the sky above contrasts with its deadness. Here, on the other hand, the sky is radiant, the light is living, the golden light which seems to pour not only from the sun, but from all the points of the transparent blue heavens. One looks down, and the ungrateful earth lies there, hopeless and helpless, a dying, withered desert: one almost fancies one hears the Devil laughing as he dares even Almighty power to bring forth bread.

This is what gives one a supernatural, mysterious feeling in Egypt,–the looks naturally turn to the sky when the earth has no beauty that one should desire it, and the heavens have all beauty. The struggle between God and the Devil is perpetually visible before one’s thoughts, for the earth seems the abode of the Devil, the heavens of God; and you do not wonder at the Orientals being the mystical people they have become, nor at the Europeans, where all beauty is of the earth, and the thoughts turn to the earth, becoming a practical, active people.

Here’s an excerpt from Lady Anna’s (fictional) journal:

We rode on, and we stopped only twice. Once when we made camp for the night. The other earlier: when the sun set beyond the Gulf of Suez, making clear to me whence came the name the ‘Red’ Sea, for the setting sun brought out the red and black of the ore in the mountains and the sea reflected it all back. All the reds, and yellows and orange and purple, were in that wonderful landscape, and as it faded and the colours all round us melted more and more into gentleness, I thought there should be some act–some formal recognition of this daily magnificence. Even as the thought formed itself in my mind, we came to a halt as if by agreement. The animals knelt, the men dismounted and turned towards the South-East. One voice was lifted: ‘Allahu Akbar’, and they prayed silently together.

I might think that Soueif is delicately parodying the orientalizing English tendency to translate the Egyptian landscape into something exotically mystical, except that in her scene, Anna too is moved to prayer and to peace–and after all, isn’t there something spiritually uplifting about extraordinary natural beauty? For George Eliot, it’s the landscapes of one’s childhood that carry one towards “religious” peace and truth. What’s interesting in these examples (well, one among many interesting things) is the way an unfamiliar landscape opens up new spiritual ideas or possibilities.

Meg Federico, Welcome to the Departure Lounge

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Well, here I am, right after making a big to-do about reviewing a book by an author I know–reviewing another book by an author I know! Who knew I knew so many authors–and, happily, such good ones, too! In the interests of full disclosure, then, Meg Federico is my near neighbor here in Halifax, and while I am still only looking forward to meeting John Cotter in person, I have chatted with Meg many times, and I thought it was about time I read her book. I’m glad I did: it’s both funny and touching.

Welcome to the Departure Lounge is a memoir about Meg’s mother’s decline into dementia. Depressing as that sounds (and depressing, of course, as it actually was), the book itself is not, actually, depressing but rather finds and exploits a fine line between hilarity and pathos as Meg takes us through the chaos that descends on her family as a result of her mother’s illness. “The Departure Lounge” is the nickname she and her brother give to the house where her mother, Addie, lives with her second husband, Walter–whose Alzheimer’s is also steadily advancing. Addie’s doctor won’t declare her incompetent (“Oh, right, competence,” he says to Meg. “Like anyone is ever competent”), so she and Walter are left nominally in charge of their increasingly haphazard home, cared for by a rotating roster of caregivers overseen, as far as possible, by their children, most of whom, like Meg, live many miles away. The mounting confusion is worsened by Addie and Walter’s fondness for booze. Together, they are a defiantly loopy team:

Ornella often answered the front door to find a deliveryman with a TV set and a case of scotch. Mom couldn’t see well enough to dial the phone, but Walter could. Together, they called liquor stores and placed large orders. The stores were only too happy to oblige and took credit cards over the phone. There were fifty liquor stores in a twenty-mile radius. I called as many as I could and asked them not to take Walter’s orders. But I couldn’t get them all. If it wasn’t booze, it was TV sets. Walter was having trouble working the remote, so he thought the set was broken. And unfortunately, he couldn’t remember that he’d already placed an order, so more TV sets kept showing up. That made him very angry. “Who thinks they can send us these things?” he said. The UPS man and the FedEx lady became regulars at the house. “There’s two more TVs. What do you want me to do with them?” Ornella asked me, a million miles away in Canada. I added “Return Unusual Purchases to my list”.

That list of things for Meg and the other offspring to deal with is ever-growing, and the stress and chaos spill over into Meg’s regular life as a “soccer mom” up in Halifax.  She gets phone calls incessantly about one crisis or another, sometimes with her mother and step-father, sometimes among the staff. “Astrid is putting voodoo on us at night, in your mother’s bedroom,” Addie’s helper Ornella phones to report; later on, the cook, Cassandra, calls to say “Those people are robbing your mother blind”–the supplies she lays in Friday night are gone by Monday morning, and Meg also discovers that her mother’s jewelry box has been emptied. There are falls, and worse. Through the fog of his Alzheimer’s, Walter clings to a protective instinct for his “Bride”–but because he rarely understands what is going on around him, this leads to its own catastrophes as he lashes out in what he thinks is her defense:

Walter started out the following day with his usual round of breakfast gin and tonics. Mother fell. As Ornella lifted her, Walter launched a two-fisted frontal assault. Ornella managed to duck the first punch, but the left hook caught her on the jaw. Edward [Walter’s helper] was nowhere to be found. Ornella called the police, who called me in Halifax. Walter, Edward and Ornella were shouting at one another in the background, punctuated by Mom yelling, “Stop it!” at the top of her lungs.

“Okay, buddy, calm down,” a male voice said, presumably to Walter. “Mrs. Federico? This is very confusing here.”

I heard the other police officer saying, “No more drinking. I am a policeman and you are not going to drink anymore!”

. . . The officer on the phone said to me, “Look, I don’t think you want me to arrest your father.”

I resisted the impulse to say, That would be ideal.

The police are called again later, when Meg and the staff intervene to protect Addie from Walter’s disinhibited lust. During one of Meg’s frequent visits, she gets the lock fixed on Addie’s door; later that night, Walter beats at it yelling “I want my Bride!” and eventually “take[s] a whack” at the worker trying to dissuade him. Someone calls 911, but then Addie refuses to file any charges.

In the course of these events, Walter and Mom had become united against the rest of us. “You want Walter to go to jail,” Mother said accusingly. “Why would you do a thing like that?” Walter had gone blank, as he sometimes did. Totally baffled, he followed Mother down the hall. “You better come and stay with me tonight, Walter,” she said, as they got to his bedroom door. “I’ll need help if the police come back.” “The police?” he asked. “Really?”

As Meg says, “the whole thing was absurd,” but as she’s also well aware, it has its dark, even frightening side always shadowing the comedy. Further, as she interweaves stories about her family history into the narrative of her mother’s mental disintegration, she helps us get to know Addie enough that we feel the force of her former personality enough to appreciate her loss. Their relationship was never an easy one, and the book offers no idealized or sentimental picture of the past. At one point we learn, rather shockingly, that Addie tied little Meg to her bed at night for a while, to keep her on her strict bedtime schedule–much later, when Addie takes to launching herself deliberately and damagingly on to the floor, Meg notes that “the urge to tie her up was hard to resist.” An unhappy teenager suffering at boarding school, Meg runs off home, but when she shows up at the front door, her mother “looked out through the screen and said ‘Yes?’ as though I were a stranger”:

I went absolutely hollow. If I’d thought I might be welcome, I was mistaken. Mom kept me standing on the steps. She said through the screen that she had company, and they were just sitting down for dinner. “You have to understand that now you are a guest. You come home when you have an invitation,” she said. But it dawned on her that she could not really send me away, and she let me in.

But family feeling runs deep and it takes more than a vexed history to undo the longing for a mother’s love and approval. As Addie declines, things become simpler, but not easier, as in this poignant scene:

One morning when I arrived for my monthly shift, Mom scuttled towards me, rolling her walker. . . . Mother’s blank and dull face lit up like a sunflower. “Meggo, dear!” she said, with a huge toothy smile, lurching at me, hugging me, and ramming me with the walker. She was so glad to see me, pressing her face into my shoulder, gripping my arms. To share a moment of simple uncalculated love, my mother had had to become a dependent old lady with a dismantled intellect.

During long dreary days at the Departure Lounge, Meg comes to understand her mother better, seeing her “in a new light, one that illuminated the background.” Those moments of connection are intermittent, broken by Addie’s drifts back into confusion, but they help Meg think differently about her own role as both daughter and mother.

The story moves towards its inevitable conclusion. Even then, however, in what the book urges us to see as the paradox of real life, there’s no tidy separation between laughter and grief. Addie dies even as the caterer is arriving with the supplies she had ordered herself for her birthday party, and her passing is marked, not with dignity or heartfelt tears, but with a ridiculous struggle with the EMS team that arrives to “pronounce,” who will not recognize the DNR order as legitimate and hassle the family about liability as Meg holds off them and their defibrillator. At the wake, poor Walter is brought in to see Addie in her coffin and can’t grasp the situation: “Why is that woman asleep at this party?” he asks innocently. Like so many moments in Welcome to the Departure Lounge, this one makes you want to laugh and cry at once.

John Cotter, Under the Small Lights

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This is only the second time I’ve written on Novel Readings about a book by someone I know. The first time was my post about my Dalhousie colleague Ian Colford’s hauntingly elusive collection Evidence. Actually, I don’t exactly know John Cotter–not in person, at least. But in about six weeks I hope to be drinking with him in New York, along with my other new colleagues at Open Letters (where I have just recently joined the editorial team). We have met virtually, you might say, and know each other almost exclusively through our writing, of one kind or another. Reading John’s book is another step towards getting to know him, then, not least because, as he explains here, he has given some of his own afternoons as an aspiring writer to his protagonist Jack.

In both of these cases, I hesitated about posting a review, not because I hesitated about the quality of the books, but because interpretation suddenly seems a more precarious undertaking when you’re that much more aware of the real-life author as someone with plans, intentions, and opinions about his carefully crafted work–ideas with which your own idiosyncratic reading may well be at variance. Of course, this is always the critic’s situation, and usually I just press on. Obviously, that’s what I’ve decided to do here too, not only because of the basic principle that writers want to be read and must expect that nobody else’s reading will be quite their own, but because in this case (as with Evidence) the book is just too interesting for me to leave alone. After I finished it, I kept thinking about what I would say about it if I blogged about it, and after a couple of days it seemed silly not to have a go. John can always set me straight over our drinks in August–or here in the comments section, if he feels the urge.

So. One of the cover blurbs describes the novella Under the Small Lights as a bildungsroman, that is, a coming of age story or a novel of education or development (‘Bildung‘ is one of those German words we can’t quite translate into English). This seems basically apt, though it’s not entirely clear to me how far Jack has developed at the end of the book: he’s looking towards his developed self, perhaps, having cleared away some of the youthful confusions and delusions that have been muddling his progress. It’s also a kunstlerroman, the story of an artist’s development, though here too Jack is looking ahead, aspiring, rather than having achieved–unless, as it’s a first-person narrative, we take Under the Small Lights itself as the end result of that process. There’s no overt metafictional gesture towards that, but with first-person narration there’s always that question of whether we are to take the speaker as the ‘author’ or simply as a device. If the former, we might expect some evidence along the way that the narrator’s perspective has changed, has distanced itself from the in-the-moment experience he narrates (as, for instance, in Great Expectations or Jane Eyre the retrospective narrator displays insight not available to young Pip or young Jane). Again, there are no overt gestures in this direction, but the fairly elaborate construction of the book, which cuts between times and episodes, certainly creates a perspective that, cumulatively, does exceed what Jack seems capable of during the events he describes.

As a character, Jack is indistinct: his creator calls him a “collage personality,” and the novel’s epigraph calls our attention directly to the permeability of identity: “I often think that we’re all mere composites of our favorite people’s habits,” it begins. Though I found Jack’s slightly vaporous quality a problem for a while, it eventually seemed like the point of the book, that is, he needs to define his own character, to declare himself, rather than trying to find it outside himself or borrow it from other people. He has to stop asking:

Next I knew, I was at the Mass Ave. foot of alley #902, still holding my empty gin glass. Barefoot, knowing they were watching from four stories up, I took off running toward the big oak growing by the dumpster. As I threw the glass, aiming for the oak but hitting the dumpster with a tin shatter, I shouted Who am I.

Jack may not know who he is, but he knows who he wants: Corinna. She was his friend Bill’s girlfriend; when the novella opens, she has recently married his friend Paul. For a moment, in between these relationships, it looked as if she might be Jack’s, and his desire for her (or is it his desire to be Bill? or to beat out Paul?) drives him, and the story, forward. Corinna, as I read her, belongs with Hardy’s Sue Bridehead and Waugh’s Julia: they are all fey, elusive, alluring, teasing, putatively intellectual, and (to my annoyance) apparently endlessly attractive to deep-thinking men. That said, one sign of Jack’s development is that (unlike Jude or poor Ryder) he has seen through Corinna by the end, and through the fog of self-indulgent moping that masquerades as enduring love. Though I didn’t think much of poor Jack, it seemed pretty clear that Corinna was a false idol. A Victorian novelist would have given Jack a better option, one he would have proved his maturation by choosing in the end (as Waverley chooses Rose instead of Flora, or David Copperfield learns to love Agnes after Dora). Actually, there’s one Victorian novelist who leaves us with a threesome, rather than a choice (Walter, Marian, and Laura in The Woman in White) which is the kind of conclusion Jack thinks he wants for a long time, everyone living and loving together, but he can’t have it, perhaps because there is too much competition, as well as fantasy, in all of the relationships involved. No good alternative does emerge for Jack, then–certainly not the equally indistinct Star (who in her turn has been a kind of imitation Corinna). It’s just time, finally, to move on, to get on with it. The evocative final pages seemed to me to capture the slightly disorienting sense we probably all have when we realize that people and events that seemed momentous and all-encompassing recede, drift away. You don’t really understand that, when you’re young.

And the characters in this novel really did strike me as very young, not just literally, though they are that, but in their preoccupation with each other, their self-indulgent behavior, their insouciance, their artsy pretention. They weren’t people I recognized; I certainly didn’t recognize my own youth in them, and not, I think, just because it was a different decade, or a different country, though I suppose Vancouver in the late 80s was a pretty different place than Boston or New York in the late 90s. I actually found the picture of their lives quite alienating, as a literal story: I don’t find drunken idiocy or stoned pseudo-profundity entertaining in real life either. So I preferred the characters at their more abstract level, though the bildungsroman form, of course, does imply that they not only will but should change. I also found myself thinking, as I read, about something Claire Tomalin said about George Eliot: “She writes about sex perfectly,” Tomalin says; “She never mentions it at all. I mean, who needs the penis and the pubic hair? Sex isn’t that–sex is the feeling.”

But those are, as I’ve said, my own idiosyncratic responses. Under the Small Lights is an artfully written novel: the style is at once elliptical and allusive, and its parts are elegantly choreographed. It’s also sometimes quite funny: the climactic chapter “The Open Field,” for instance, develops with the painfully comic inevitability of the best episodes of Seinfeld. It has other aspects I haven’t touched on at all, including the play Jack and Bill are trying to write, including on their ill-fated expedition to Walden Pond, or the whole larger interest in acting and theater, and in poetry, all of which adds both intertextual and metatextual layering to the narrative. For a book that’s less than 200 fairly sparse pages, Under the Small Lights has a lot going on. Like Evidence, it’s a book I almost certainly would never have read if I didn’t know the author, and in both case I was glad to have gone that much further outside myself–to have been prompted by friendship to look at the world differently, or at a different world, thanks to their courage in putting their vision into words.

Recent Reading: Mina and Mantel

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In my previous post about summer reading plans I forgot to mention that my daughter and I have committed once again to our local library’s summer reading club. (As an aside, let’s hear it for public libraries, perhaps the greatest public institutions we have!)  This year her pledge (for me to match) is 25 books over July and August. I’ve managed to read four titles since she signed up, but I haven’t blogged about any of them yet, so I have some catching up to do.

First up, I finally read Denise Mina’s Field of Blood, which was highly recommended when I put out my ‘bleg’ for ideas for my seminar on women and detective fiction. Unlike many of the titles I read as I worked on my book list, it’s very good! What makes it stand out from the others? The simplest answer is that it suits my own reading tastes better. It’s rich in context and characterization, but it’s not overwritten, pedantic, or (like the awful Stieg Larsson books) just one damned thing after another with intermittent pornography (I know, I know, Salander is a great character, but…). Paddy Meehan is flawed and conflicted, but not melodramatically so; her family and co-workers are effectively and efficiently specified so that we rapidly get a sense of the community she moves in, which is an interestingly complicated one. It’s not really a detective novel, and in fact one reason I think I couldn’t have fit it into my course very well is that the crime itself is almost peripheral to Paddy’s own story. I thought there were a few missteps: there’s a ‘killing-due-to-mistaken-identity’ episode that I found did cross over into cliche in the writing, for instance. I was most interested in the push-and-pull for Paddy herself between her family’s expectations and her ambitions. Paddy is also a good example of the type I now think of (thanks to Anita Brookner) as the tortoise: she’s plain, underappreciated intellectually, overlooked romantically–in short, she’s every socially awkward, ill-at-ease bookish young girl who can therefore read in her eventual success validation of their own painful experience as misfits. As Brookner points out (in Hotel du Lac), books are written for the tortoise market because in reality the hares are off winning the race (or the guy).

I did read one other mystery, though I finished it in June so I can’t count it towards my summer total: Katherine V. Forrest’s Murder at the Nightwood Bar. If I had read this sooner, I might have included it on the syllabus, though I would have had some misgivings. I had hoped to find a teachable example of lesbian detective fiction, which is a thriving subgenre now. Forrest was one of the earliest writers to establish herself in it: Amateur City, the first in the Kate Delafield series, was published originally in 1984, soon after Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky had launched their female private eyes. Murder at the Nightwood Bar is far more overtly political than the Laurie King and Sandra Scoppetone ones I read earlier, and the crime is set up to resonate with those political interests and to stand as exemplary of a larger social problem, giving the book the kind of unified effect that lends itself to the kind of work we would do in a seminar discussion. On the other hand, it is perhaps a bit too obviously set up in this way: I like a little nuance with my social consciousness raising. Forrest is another competent but unspectacular stylist; nothing in the book seemed as literarily fine as, say, P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. At any rate, the book didn’t make it on the list for this fall (though Nancy Drew ultimately did–we’ll see how that goes!) but I’ll revisit it next time around.

My other summer book for this post is totally unlike these two: I continued my trip through Hilary Mantel’s back catalogue with The Giant O’Brien. Once again, it was a surprise: like Beyond Black, it gives no sign of being by the same author as Wolf Hall, for instance, except in being strangely conceived but ultimately quite compelling. It follows the experience of a Giant who has travelled from Ireland to London in the 1780s, escaping poverty and famine at the cost, ultimately, of his self-respect, his integrity, his humanity, and even his life, though we realize from early on that all of these aspects have been compromised for him from the start simply by his being a giant, a freak, a spectacle. Juxtaposed against his story is that of the anatomist John Hunter. They are set up to embody a number of oppositions, not just scientist and potential experiment or subject, but also the man of facts, of physicality, and the man of imagination–ironically, in an extraordinary physical frame, but living the life that really matters to him in his mind alone, and through the stories he tells. They are also England and Ireland, I think, and to some extent, also winner and loser. There’s pathos, but Mantel downplays it, going instead for a combination of quirky and grotesque that, inevitably but rightly, one of the critics in the blurbs identifies with Hogarth’s famous prints of 18th-century London. The prose is beautifully styled, moving between short epigrammatic conversations, terse sections of exposition, brutal graphic detail, and passages of great lyricism without any hint of sentimentality:

The poet has his memorial in repetition, and the statesman in stone and bronze. The scholar’s hand lies always on his book, and the thinker’s eyes on canvas travel the room to rest on each human face; the rebel has his ballad and his cross, his bigot’s garland, his wreath of rope. But for the poor man and the giant there is the scrubbed wooden slab and the slop bucket, there is the cauldron and the boiling pot, and the dunghill for his lights; so he is a stench in the nose for a day or a week, so he is a no-name, so he is oblivion. Stories cannot save him. When human memory runs out, there is the memory of animals; behind that, the memory of the plants, and behind that the memory of the rocks. But the wind and the sea wear the rocks away; and the cell-line runs to its limit, where meaning falls away from it, and it loses knowledge of its own nature. Unless we plead on our knees with history, we are done for, we are lost. We must step sideways, into that country where space plaits and knots, where time folds and twists: where the years pass in a day.

Some of the most haunting passages in the novel are those in which the giant pacifies his motley associates with tales told in the resonant tenor voice that belies the monstrosity of his frame. The transcendence of his voice, his ability to take both himself and his listeners outside themselves, outside the ugly and inescapable realities of their literal lives and their physical selves, beautifully captures the promise of story-telling itself.

Music Books: “A little private imitation of what is good is a sort of private devotion to it.”

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

My title is a line from Daniel Deronda, from a conversation between Daniel and Gwendolen in which he urges her to look past the egotistic gratifications of performance (inaccessible to her, as she has discovered, because of her “middlingness”) to the other values of music as “private study.” As a long-time amateur pianist, I appreciate his suggestion that our private efforts are a way of paying tribute to musical excellence, a way, also, as he says, of preparing “to understand and enjoy what the few can do for us.” His sentiments give some dignity to my laborious attempts at the Rondo alla turca this evening! And I think he is right that playing privately, however badly, is a gesture towards something we believe in as good and beautiful, even aside from the intrinsic value of applying ourselves to something challenging and learning, if we are industrious, the rewards of getting a little bit better at it and maybe even, if we are lucky, approximating something good and beautiful ourselves.

I stopped taking piano lessons when I realized I had to decide between really taking music seriously and accepting myself as a dabbler, but I’ve never been sorry I learned to play–and not just because my former teacher was and is a kindred spirit and one of my favourite people in the world. Music has always been an emotional outlet for me, and over the years, as it turns out, the piano has been an essential accompaniment to all the major (and minor) changes in my life. As a moody adolescent, I channelled all kinds of angst through my family’s old Heinzman upright. After several years away from the keyboard, as a homesick, insecure  graduate student at Cornell, I took regular refuge in a practice room in the basement of the music building and rediscovered not just the challenge and pleasure of playing but also some important part of myself that helped me stand up to the intellectually intimidating environment I found myself in. I also, not incidentally, could eventually give quite a creditable rendition of at least one fabulous Schubert Impromptu.

Then I became the accompanist in my family life: my husband and I share a fondness for the great songs of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, and Richard Rodgers, and later expanded our “songfest” repertoire to include old movie classics like “Laura” as well as sappy 70s hits like “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” We used to soothe our infant son after bathtime (which he hated) with rousing renditions of “Di quella pira” (which may explain both his perfect pitch and his aversion to opera), and now our daughter loves to gather with us for carols at Christmas. On those rare occasions these days when I’m home quite alone, I sometimes treat myself to a browse through some old favourites, especially my beloved Treasury of Grand Opera, and almost every summer I vow (as I have again this year) to use some of my ‘down’ time to achieve at least some approximation of mastery over a real piece or two. Our library of music books is relatively small, but I consider them every bit as essential to what Nathan Schneider has just memorably discussed at Open Letters as my “memory theater” as the novels, memoirs, histories, and other genres in the collection. A lot of them turn out to be too old to find images of online–and that, in itself, is one reason I’ll continue to cherish them.

What about you? Do you have music books you cherish, or musical habits that are your own form of “private devotion” to the good?

Best of ‘Novel Readings’: James Wood, How Fiction Works

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

This review first went up in March 2008. My brooding over deep vs. broad reading has had me thinking again about Wood’s criticism, which I wrote admiringly about when I first discovered him in 2007. (This remarkably belated discovery speaks volumes, I think, of the divide between academic and public criticism.) I have also been thinking a lot about Becky Sharp, because in an essay for the July issue of Open Letters Monthly I lay out a more elaborate version of the argument I touch on here for her incidental significance to the novel in which she is so captivating a heroine. Both lines of thought led me back to take another look at this piece. I haven’t kept up with all of Wood’s reviews since, mostly because he and I often choose different books to pay attention to, but when I do (as with his recent piece on David Mitchell) I’m still struck by the elegant erudition of his language and analysis. Still, as this review shows, I have some sympathy with Lauren Elkin’s proposal that Wood is “a fine specimen of a book reviewer” but not exactly a “literary critic.” Not, as they used to say on Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that.

How Fiction Works was also very ably reviewed in 2008 in Open Letters Monthly, by Dan Green of The Reading Experience.

The dust jacket describes How Fiction Works as Wood’s “first full-length book of criticism.” Anyone led by this blurb to expect sustained analysis supported by extensive research and illustration will be disappointed, as in fact How Fiction Works turns out to be essentially a ‘commonplace book,’ a collection of critical observations and insights of varying degrees of originality and sophistication, developed with varying degrees of care and detail. Wood acknowledges having set deliberate limits on his project, likening it in his introduction to Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, proposing to offer practical “writer’s anwers” to “a critic’s questions,” and admitting (though with no tone of apology) that he used only “the books at hand in [his] study.” To some extent I agree with other reviewers who consider it only fair to evaluate the book Wood wrote, rather than regretting he didn’t write another one. Yet even within the parameters Wood sets, I think there are grounds for wishing he, with his exceptional gifts and qualifications as both reader and critic, had not sold himself (or us) short in fulfilling them. Further, beginning with the invocation of Forster but going well beyond it, the book has pretensions to grandeur: for instance, also in his introduction Wood remarks that Barthes and Shklovsky “come to conclusions about the novel that seem to me interesting but wrong-headed, and this book conducts a sustained argument with them” (2). With gestures such as this, Wood claims an elevated stature for his critical contribution that is undermined by its casual construction and over-confident approach to scholarship. Though How Fiction Works provides many further proofs of Wood’s critical gifts and considerable erudition, I think it also proves that even the best practical critic flounders when working only with what he has already to hand or in mind.

Right off the bat I was irritated by the book’s structure. Wood has said that he felt liberated by using the numbered “paragraphs” or sections, but allowing yourself to skip from thought to thought in this way means letting yourself off the hook too often. Frequently in the margins of my students’ work I write “And so? Finish the thought!” One effect of crafting, first paragraphs, and then longer pieces as sustained wholes is that in working out the overall movement of your ideas and building in appropriately specific transitions, you confront both the logic and the further implications of your claims: the form pressures you to think better. Numbered bits, however, relieve that pressure: you can just stop with one topic and start the next, and as long as they are more or less related, you can claim to be producing a unified whole, even if you are only papering over gaps. In How Fiction Works, the breaks often seem unnecessary: a new number sets off what is really just the next sentence in the idea already unfolding. Most of the time, however, they are substitutes for careful transitions. They allow a certain stream-of-consciousness effect to creep in: that last bit reminds me of this exception to a general principle, or of a writer who also does that, or of another favourite excerpt, or of a time I went to a concert with my wife. Well, OK, I guess, and no doubt it would have been much more difficult to do a coherent chapter offering a theory of, say, fictional character, realism, or morality and the novel. And I suppose it’s true that non-academic readers don’t want the kind of detail and complexity such a full account of these topics would require. Even so, the numbered bits felt lazy to me. The footnotes too had an aimlessness about them. Some of them covered ideas or examples that seemed no less important to their chapter than most of the bits allowed their own numbered section (note 53 on p. 150, to give one example) while others appeared entirely unnecessary to the book (note 40 on p. 121, or note 41 on p. 124, for instance).

The TLS reviewer objects to Wood’s “grace notes”: “It is sometimes hard to distinguish a gasp of admiration for another’s skill from the contented sigh when the books in one’s study satisfy one’s own theories.” I shared this reaction, not least because “how fine that is” (139) is an expression of taste, not criticism. But Wood is a compelling reader of details, even passages. It’s when he makes broader assertions that he leaves himself more open to objections. For one thing, he has some governing assumptions about what fiction is for that he treats as universal rather than historically or theoretically specific. In his chapter on “Sympathy and Complexity,” for instance, as a footnote to his remarks on fiction as a means of extending our sympathies (the occasion for one of his shockingly few references to George Eliot!), he adds this:

We don’t read in order to benefit in this way from fiction. We read fiction because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on,–because it is alive and we are alive. (129)

Well, maybe, but not everybody, and not all the time: for instance, most of the Victorian critics I have been editing for my Broadview anthology [now that the anthology is actually out, I wonder if Wood would like a copy–maybe I’ll send one along!] would not have recognized this highly aestheticized motive for novel reading. Is it fair, or even sensible, to say that they were simply wrong? Or to ignore how the formal developments of the Victorian novel furthered ends not adequately respected by Wood’s post-Jamesian formulations? His is in many respects a teleological account of the history of the novel. “Progress!” he exclaims after a quotation from Proust: “In Fielding and Defoe, even in the much richer Cervantes, revelation of this altering kind occurs at the level of plot” (125). But were Fielding and Defoe trying to do what Proust did and failing? How much better we might understand them if we allow them what James calls their “donnee.” “It is subtlety that matters,” he declares in his chapter on character; “subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure”: “I learn more about the consciousness of the soldier in Chekhov’s The Kiss than I do about the consciousness of Becky Sharpe [sic] in Vanity Fair.” But Becky Sharp’s consciousness is surely not the point of Vanity Fair; indeed, I argue in my own lectures [and now, in my essay in July’s Open Letters] that too close a focus on Becky risks diverting us from Thackeray’s grand gesture of holding the mirror up to ourselves, so that the novel becomes an opportunity for us to reflect on our own morality and mortality. “Was she guilty or not?” the narrator asks–and, remarkably, will not tell us, because ultimately she is not the point but the occasion, the device. Thackeray is not a failed Chekhov any more than Dickens is a failed Flaubert. To Wood, “the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style” (58), but that history is partial and often distorting.

About the operations of free indirect discourse and the importance of knowing who ‘owns’ which words, on the other hand, Wood is typically astute. Here’s one place where examples from Middlemarch would have served him well, though at the risk of undermining his generalizations. Consider this passage from Chapter 1, for instance:

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

Think how much is lost on a reader who improperly identifies the source of that word “naturally”–or the last two sentences altogether!

Wood is good on the telling detail as well as the quality he calls “thisness”: “any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability” (54). But again, when he moves into prescription, he becomes less persuasive, as when he objects to the “layer of gratuitous detail” in 19th-century realist fiction. Again, the challenge is in defining “gratuitous” (as, clearly, Wood himself is well aware), but he can’t propose any principle except, perhaps, his idea that “insignificant” details avoid irrelevance if they are “significantly insignificant” (68). After recounting an incident in which he and his wife had “invented entirely different readings” of a violinist’s frown at a concert, he claims that a “good novelist would have let that frown alone, and would have let our revealing comments alone, too: no need to smother this little scene in explanation” (72). Again, well, maybe. I can imagine at least one “good novelist” who might have done great things with their “different readings” of that little moment, perhaps even using their “revealing comments” as a chance to reveal even more about perception and reality as well as human relationships (“these things are a parable…”). Doesn’t it depend on what your novel is about and on the formal methods you are using to realize those goals?

I’d like to return before I close to the “Sympathy and Complexity” chapter, because this is a topic close to my heart, one on which I have spent a lot of my own critical energy recently, and one I expected Wood to handle particularly well. “Perfunctory” is the best word I can think of to describe it. I’ve mentioned already his dehistoricizing assumption that “we” don’t read in order to receive moral benefits. I doubt this is true in practice, and I also question the separation he implies between moral and aesthetic readings. Here is a case in which even a little research outside “the books at hand in [his] own study” would have immeasurably enriched his discussion: Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep, for instance, would have helped him complicate exactly that separation. And the conversation about how fiction might do “what [Bernard] Williams wanted moral philosophy to do” (135) has many participants besides Williams: Martha Nussbaum comes promptly to mind. Further, not all novels avoid providing “philosophical answers”; he replicates Nussbam’s error in generalizing about “the novel,” but as a professional novel reader, he should know better.

Here the hybrid character of How Fiction Works proves a genuine weakness, I think. This chapter is not a full, responsible, or authoritative inquiry into its subject. Of course, it does not pretend to be (remember, the book promises only “a writer’s answers” to “a critic’s questions”). But then how should we evaluate it? Doesn’t Wood do even his non-specialist audience a disservice by taking up complicated subjects on which there already exists a rich body of scholarship and offering his own fairly casual observations with the confidence of real expertise? What a much greater contribution it would be to distill that complex material and present it accessibly! To grab what’s at hand and say just what comes to mind bespeaks an enviable but also problematic degree of confidence. And while the non-expert reader is in no position to object, the expert reader is easily deflected with the excuse that she is not the intended audience…

After I read How Fiction Works I re-read some of my collection of Wood’s essays, including his reviews of Never Let Me Go, Saturday, and Brick Lane. This is really wonderful stuff, as I have remarked before; I admire it wholeheartedly for its critical acuity, its literary elegance, and its moral seriousness. But considering How Fiction Works strictly as one among many books about books (and Wood is wrong, or perhaps disingenuous, when he says “there are surprisingly few books” of this kind about fiction [1]), I think there are many better choices available. I continue to recommend David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction, for instance, which takes up many of the same topics as Wood, though under a less grandiose umbrella of prescriptive claims. I think it’s an exciting development that Wood has landed a job in Harvard’s English Department. In taking this now unconventional route from journalism to the academy, he is following in the footsteps of many eminent Victorian critics (David Masson, for instance). But considering how bitterly difficult it is for those following the established professional route to land any academic job at all, it’s frustrating to think that he may not be held to anything like the same standard of rigour as many critics far less lauded and applauded. Here’s hoping that he has more books in him as good as The Broken Estate.

(Original post cross-posted to The Valve.)

Summer Reading Plans

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

With everything done but the marking in my class, I can now look ahead to July and August and ask myself what any self-respecting English professor inevitably asks: What will I be reading?

Actually, I recently spent a friendly evening with several other English professors and the question they asked me was “How do you ever find time for all that reading?”–which is an interesting question, when you think about it. It does rather imply that I’m reading when I should be doing something else, or at least I’m reading instead of doing something else, namely, whatever it is that they are doing. Or, to refine that insinuation somewhat, it implies that my reading isn’t the same as their reading. Perhaps what they really mean is “How do you ever find time to read so much for fun?” or “to read things that aren’t obviously for your research.” Or maybe it just means “You must be neglecting your garden/family/knitting/TV watching/sleep”  (to which the responses are, in order, yes (but my husband does a great job of it) / no, I’m pretty sure not / yes, definitely, and my quilting too / yes, pretty certainly, but after you have children you come too regard sleep as a rare luxury anyway).  Perhaps they just meant it as a compliment  (“Wow, you read a lot–good for you!”), or perhaps they suspect me of speed-reading! Probably, really, they didn’t mean much by it at all, and the fact that it has obviously made me feel defensive means that I have projected my own anxieties about how I use my time onto them–which I shouldn’t do to my friends!

Still, they got me thinking, not for the first time, about the relationship of my “leisure” or non-required reading to my work and professional life. It’s true that I never, ever pick up a book of academic literary criticism anymore to read just out of interest. Reading of that sort is strictly occasional for me now, meaning that I do it only when the occasion demands–when I’m either studying up on something I’m going to teach for the first time, or the first time in a while, or working on a specific research project. But I don’t think the other reading I do is strictly irrelevant. For instance, I’ve ended up teaching as well as developing research projects based on books I initially read initially “only” for my own interest. Without defining relevance quite so narrowly, too, it just seems right that someone whose job it is to talk to students about literature and perhaps even to put it into some meaningful relationship with their own lives should be an active, curious reader including of some currents in contemporary writing. I make a big deal in my classes about the texts we are reading, which come in such uniform and sanitized packages (no offense, OUP, Penguin, Norton, or Broadview-they’re beautiful and extremely useful editions!), but which were never intended for quite that kind of safe consumption–writers write to stir things up, whether social, political, aesthetic, sensual, or theoretical things. Reading widely, if miscellaneously, helps me sustain an interest in literature as that kind of living and purposeful venture, and I think that reading enhances–it certainly motivates–my classroom time as well as (of course) my own life. The diffusion of my reading attention, though, has in recent years made me less and less patient with the kind of deep, burrowing reading that academic research requires. I’m more and more aware of what I haven’t read, despite all that I have read, and I feel frustrated that the kind of reading I have done (still do) in deliberate pursuit of professional goals (scholarly articles and books) has been at the expense of the kind of broad reading experience that would give me the knowledge and confidence to write a different kind of criticism. And yet, I do have professional responsibilities, and even, maybe, a lingering interest in getting that last promotion, so for those reasons I need to remain a disciplined reader; and I do learn from and sometimes even enjoy the ‘work’ reading I do.

So, with these different priorities (reading deeply or reading widely), what will I be reading this summer?

One possibility that I feel, somewhat sadly, is slipping away from me is The Tale of Genji. When I learned of the summer project being co-hosted by Open Letters Monthly and the Quarterly Conversation, it was just before the beginning of my class, and at this point I’m about 200 pages behind. Though I am enthusiastic about the project in principle, and have been keeping an eye on the interesting and lively posts at its blog site, I fear I can’t catch up and keep up now without abandoning the other books I already had marked as summer prospects. Chief among these is War and Peace, which I’ve been yearning after for some time–so you see why I find adding Genji a difficult prospect. But I do have it from the library, and I have made a start on it, so we’ll see how that goes. I’m also just at the beginning of Margaret Oliphant’s The Perpetual Curate, as a further effort in the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge, and I’m finding it sharp and amusing so far, making it an attractive prospect to stick with it and finish it. I also need to read Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, as one of my MA students is writing a chapter on it; so far, it’s not nearly as alluring a read as The Perpetual Curate (leading me to sympathize with James Wood’s remark that “when Woolf fails it is generally when she is being Victorian”). Still, duty calls! Rereads are also in my future, as I try to, at last, get my Ahdaf Soueif paper into form for submission to a peer-reviewed journal; I’ve been thinking of expanding it from In the Eye of the Sun to include comparative analysis of The Map of Love. On my TBR pile I also have Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, William Volmann’s Europe Central, A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book, Azar Nafisi’s Things I Have Been Silent About, Hilary Mantel’s The Giant O’Brian, and Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood–tempting, all! Plus I haven’t finished the Hermione Lee biography of Woolf, and I recently picked up several second-hand copies of Woolf’s diaries and letters, which at the very least I would like to spend some concentrated time browsing in. Finally, I am still thinking about the whole ‘books of my life’ idea that came to me towards the end of my recent rant about getting away from metacriticism and on with finding my own critical voice, and the book I would most like to write about, if I can figure out how, is Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field, so I will be reading that again, along with Gaudy Night, another of my top picks for that category.

Hmm. I still haven’t mentioned any scholarly books. I’m sure there will be some! But I doubt I’ll learn more, or even as much, from any of them as I’ll learn from finishing War and Peace.

This Month in My Class and Other Updates: Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

A long, long time ago, I noted that I was about to begin teaching an intensive spring session course…oh, wait, it was only four weeks ago! And tomorrow is our last class meeting before the final exam. As Archdeacon Grantley would say, Good Heavens! As I said then, “the pace is relentless . . . and it all goes by in what seems like a flash”–and it certainly has gone by with amazing speed and intensity. We’ve read and discussed Pride and Prejudice, Scott’s “The Two Drovers,” Jane Eyre, Gaskell’s short stories “Lizzie Leigh” and “The Old Nurse’s Story,” A Christmas Carol, and Silas Marner. Though at times during class discussion I did regret not having done bigger books (with Dickens, especially), for the time we actually had between class meetings this did seem like plenty to read, as the students were also completing (and therefore I was also reading and evaluating) daily reading responses and two other writing assignments. Also, though at times I regretted having signed up for another of these mad romps, overall it still suits me better to be teaching than not. I was lucky in my students, too, the large majority of whom seemed keen and participated energetically and intelligently pretty much every day.

I hoped that being under some pressure and on a regular work schedule would be good for my reading and blogging. That turned out to be somewhat optimistic (you may have noticed a couple more posts from the archives–though I always meant that to be part of establishing myself at this new address, so it wasn’t altogether a sign of being overwhelmed with other business.) As for my reading, I did complete The Antiquary and write about it for the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge (you should also look at the posts on it at Wuthering Expectations–between us, I think we did it justice–and it is indeed uncanny how allusions to the darn book do crop up once you’re noticing them, as in a review of Silas Marner from which I was reading to my students just yesterday, quite unsuspecting that once again, the Mucklebackit cottage would come up as exemplary of how to write about simple folk without diminishing them). I sneaked in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop, too, before things got too crazy (and it appears to be the case that The Blue Flower, which I take to be her best, or at least most highly acclaimed, novel, is not currently in print, at least in Canada? can this be true?).

Last night I also finally managed to finish the only other book I’ve been able to read any of during the course, which is Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black. It’s a very strange, grimly comic, discomfiting book. A bit hesitantly, I do recommend it, even if (like me) you are a complete skeptic about psychic phenomena of all kinds. Mantel has an astonishing ability to compel my belief in her stories–and her versatility is astonishing as well, as I can’t think of anything about Beyond Black that gives it away as being “by the author of Wolf Hall,” or “by the author of A Place of Greater Safety,” for that matter. You’ll get an idea of the book’s flavor from this remark, by her “sensitive,” Alison, who is impatient with the reiterated questions she gets about proof:

Why should people come through from Spirit for other people who don’t believe in them? You see, most people, once they’ve passed, they’re not really interested in talking to this side. The effort’s too much for them. Even if they wanted to do it, they haven’t got the concentration span. You say they give trivial messages, but that’s because they’re trivial people. You don’t get a personality transplant when you’re dead. You don’t suddenly get a degree in philosophy. They’re not interested in helping me out with proof.

“You don’t suddenly get a degree in philosophy”–I love that. And poor Alison should know, as the spirits (if that’s even the right word) that she deals with are spiteful, even vengeful, dirty-minded, low-humored, or else vaguely pathetic, lost and confused about their situation. When her pale assistant Colette, in a panic, begs for advice on what to do if she dies, Al’s advice is hardly spiritual in the sentimental way we might casually expect:

Don’t start crying. Don’t speak to anyone. Don’t eat anything. Keep saying your name over and over. Close your eyes and look for the light. If somebody says, follow me, ask to see their ID. When you see the light, move towards it. Keep your bag clamped to your body–where your body would be. Don’t open your bag, and remember the last thing you should do is pull out a map, however lost you feel. If anybody asks you for money, ignore them, push past. Just keep moving towards the light. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t let anyone stop you. If somebody points out there’s paint on your coat or bird droppings in your hair, just keep motoring, don’t pause, don’t look left or right. If a woman approaches you with some snotty-nosed kid, kick her out of the way. It sounds harsh, but it’s for your own safety. Keep moving. Move towards the light.

It’s as if the afterlife is a tube station at rush hour, crammed with people equal parts lost, desperate, and treacherous. Al’s spirit guide is an offensive low-life named Morris, who (we gradually learn) was (is?)  intimately connected with Alison’s childhood traumas, which include sexual abuse and mutilation (to oversimplify). I don’t think Mantel is setting up her story of the other side simply as a projection of memories and feelings from this side: though there is some cynicism mixed in about the possible chicanerie among the ranks of the mediums or psychics themselves, and about the neediness and self-absorption of their clients, that some people are “sensitive” to disembodied presences is a reality in the novel, worked out in a wry spirit of ‘what if…’ What if people are just as self-interested and emotionally needy after they pass over? What if they retain some capacity to interact with the living world? What if they can find you, or follow you, and annoy you, no matter where you go to hide? What if the pressure of their intrusions and demands makes you ill and exhausted? On the night of Princess Diana’s death, for instance, Alison is reduced to “rocking herself and groaning” from the shockwaves to her sensitivities. But Mantel shuns pathos: when Diana “manifests” to Alison, she’s lost her glamour but retained a quality of peevish entitlement:

“Give my love to my boys,” Diana said. “My boys, I’m sure you know who I mean.”

Al wouldn’t prompt her: you must never, in that fashion, give way to the dead. They will tease you and urge you, they will suggest and flatter; you mustn’t take their bait. If they want to speak, let them speak for themselves.

Diana stamped her foot. “You do know their names,” she accused. “You oiky little grease spot, you’re just being hideous. Oh, fuckerama! Whatever are they called?”

“Give my love to . . . Kingy. And the other kid. Kingy and Thingy,” she says as she begins to fade away, “melting away to nothing,” Alison thinks, “to poisoned ash in the wind. . . . Al implored her silently, Di, don’t go. The room was cold.”

The constant emotional battering is exhausting, debilitating. If that’s indeed what it’s like being receptive to messages from the beyond, you might find yourself, as poor Alison does, standing in your own hallway yelling “What testicles?” to a recalcitrant spirit. Though I had some sympathy for Colette (‘”That’s it,” she says. “I don’t intend to spend another night under this roof. How can I live with a woman who has rows with people I can’t see, and who stands outside my bedroom door shouting ‘What testicles?’ It’s more than flesh and blood can stand”), it’s tormented Alison, unable to separate her present from her past, who earned my compassion, as she seeks understanding and perhaps relief from her haunted life:

Back and back. There is an interval of darkness, dwindling, suspension of the senses. She neither hears nor sees. The world has no scent or savour. She is a cell, a dot. She diminishes, to vanishing point. She is back beyond a dot. She is back where the dots come from. And still she goes back.