Even in Blogging, Everything New is Old

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I’ve been reading through the archives of some lively blog debates related to my own questions about the terms and tendencies of contemporary academic literary criticism (see, for instance, here, here or here). Following the long chains of arguments and rebuttals, examples and counter-examples, I’m struck with a familiar sense of futility: when so much has been said by so many so often, what can I hope to add? I’m also struck, though, by just how unaware I was that conversations of quite this kind were going on. It’s not that I did not know that the terms of criticism have long been debated,of course, including in polemical and political ways as they often are in these blog exchanges–I did my graduate work at Cornell in the early 90s, after all. It’s more that I literally had never heard of blogs until last year, and until early this year, I had no idea that there was such a category as ‘academic blogs.’ So what seemed to me like something new and experimental, like casually posting some notes on my current reading online, turned out to be entirely old and, as far as rethinking criticism goes, hardly experimental, especially as I did not know enough about the blogging scene to have any particular critical or theoretical agenda when I started.

I’m not really sure why my obliviousness to these online forums and debates–at a time when, after all, I was hard at work on other specialized reading and writing–strikes me as somehow symptomatic of more than just my own individual ignorance. Maybe the point is just that the ideal often expressed by academic bloggers (e.g. here or here) about opening up lines of communication is still a pretty long way off: at least in my immediate circles, blogging is definitely still seen as a fringe activity. In a way, it is ‘just’ (or just like) another academic specialization, in that academic bloggers know each other and link to each other and talk to and about each other, as do, say, medieval historians or Christina Rossetti scholars. I am persuaded that blogging has the potential to change a lot about our working and thinking lives (this was useful in clarifying some of the issues, as was this, to pick just two of the long and growing list of materials I’ve bookmarked), but old habits die hard and skeptical attitudes abound. Then, when it comes to joining in the debates, precisely because this form of publication and discussion is so diffuse, it feels like a particularly difficult conversation even to eavesdrop on, never mind to participate in. Also, while in typical academic publishing, with its glacier-like pace, it’s hard to feel that you are coming in too late, somehow reading these blog archives on the function of criticism makes further comment seem SO 2005…how does one ‘make it new,’ on or off line?

Leslie Stephen, “Charlotte Bronte”

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Just a few choice bits from the latest essay I’ve been editing for my forthcoming anthology, Leslie Stephen’s piece on Charlotte Bronte from the Cornhill Magazine. First, an apt description of the uneasy balance required of either reviewer or critic between sympathy and analysis, charity and judgment:

Undoubtedly it is a very difficult task to be alternately witness and judge; to feel strongly, and yet to analyse coolly; to love every feature in a familiar face, and yet to decide calmly upon its intrinsic ugliness or beauty. To be an adequate critic is almost to be a contradiction in terms; to be susceptible to a force, and yet free from its influence; to be moving with the stream, and yet to be standing on the bank.

Stephen’s own analysis of CB does, I think, display something like the desired balance. Here, for example, he proposes a standard against which to measure her overall achievement:

Miss Brontë, as her warmest admirers would grant, was not and did not in the least affect to be a philosophical thinker. And because a great writer, to whom she has been gratuitously compared, is strong just where she is weak, her friends have an injudicious desire to make out that the matter is of no importance, and that her comparative poverty of thought is no injury to her work. There is no difficulty in following them so far as to admit that her work is none the worse for containing no theological or philosophical disquisitions, or for showing no familiarity with the technicalities of modern science and metaphysics. But the admission by no means follows that her work does not suffer very materially by the comparative narrowness of the circle of ideas in which her mind habitually revolved. Perhaps if she had been familiar with Hegel or Sir W. Hamilton, she would have intruded undigested lumps of metaphysics, and introduced vexatious allusions to the philosophy of identity or to the principle of the excluded middle. But it is possible, also, that her conceptions of life and the world would have been enriched and harmonised, and that, without giving us more scientific dogmas, her characters would have embodied more fully the dominating ideas of the time. There is no province of inquiry–historical, scientific, or philosophical–from which the artist may not derive useful material; the sole question is whether it has been properly assimilated and transformed by the action of the poetic imagination. By attempting to define how far Miss Brontë’s powers were in fact thus bounded, we shall approximately decide her place in the great hierarchy of imaginative thinkers.

I assume, though I stand ready to be corrected, that the “great writer” to whom he refers at the beginning of this passage is George Eliot (if anyone knows of any particularly forceful contemporary comparison of CB and GE, I’d be happy to be pointed in the right direction).[*see update below] Stephen concludes that CB’s place is “a very high one,” but he also has a standard for literary and novelistic greatness that includes linking one’s particular genius to broader philosophical and historical insights, and on his view, CB’s failure to make such a connection keeps her from reaching the very highest eminence. His main example here is his analysis of Paul Emanuel in Villette. Stephen considers M. Paul a great triumph, a wholly compelling and believable character, but he finds his “intense individuality” limits his literary significance:

He is a real human being who gave lectures at a particular date in a pension at Brussels. We are as much convinced of that fact as we are of the reality of Miss Brontë herself; but the fact is also a presumption that he is not one of those great typical, characters, the creation of which is the highest triumph of the dramatist or novelist. There is too much of the temporary and accidental–too little of the permanent and essential.

Seen from an intellectual point of view, placed in his due relation to the great currents of thought and feeling of the time, we should have been made to feel the pathetic and humorous aspects of M. Emanuel’s character, and he might have been equally a living individual and yet a type of some more general idea. The philosopher might ask, for example, what is the exact value of unselfish heroism guided by narrow theories or employed on unworthy tasks; and the philosophic humourist or artist might embody the answer in a portrait of M. Emanuel considered from a cosmic or a cosmopolitan point of view. From the lower standpoint accessible to Miss Brontë he is still most attractive; but we see only his relations to the little scholastic circle, and have no such perception as the greatest writers would give us of his relations to the universe, or, as the next order would give, of his relations to the great world without.

There is much to be said, of course, about the assumption that typicality is the mark of greatness, including about how far this standard is gendered. But not least because it is currently unfashionable to consider whether one kind of thing, one literary approach, is in fact better (higher, more significant, more admirable–choose your terms) than another, it is interesting to see a clear, temperate attempt to make just such an evaluative comparison. And Stephen is eloquent in his appreciation of CB:

We cannot sit at her feet as a great teacher, nor admit that her view of life is satisfactory or even intelligible. But we feel for her as for a fellow-sufferer who has at least felt with extraordinary keenness the sorrows and disappointments which torture most cruelly the most noble virtues, and has clung throughout her troubles to beliefs which must in some form or other be the guiding lights of all worthy actions. She is not in the highest rank amongst those who have fought their way to a clearer atmosphere, and can help us to clearer conceptions; but she is amongst the first of those who have felt the necessity of consolation, and therefore stimulated to more successful efforts.

I share something of Stephen’s prejudice in favour of those who “help us to clearer conceptions” (though fiction is often most celebrated today for its ability to confound and complicate moral and philosophical questions, there does seem some advantage to working through the fog to what Stephen calls “some more comprehensible and harmonious solution”). CB resolves some of her thornier problems by highly artificial means, as Stephen points out: “What would Jane Eyre have done, and what would our sympathies have been, had she found that Mrs. Rochester had not been burnt in the fire at Thornfield? That is rather an awkward question.” Indeed. Overall, he sees her unable to sustain a consistent answer to what I think he rightly identifies as a persistent problem in her major novels (as in so many others from the time): “Where does the unlawful pressure of society upon the individual begin, and what are the demands which it may rightfully make upon our respect? . . . She is between the opposite poles of duty and happiness, and cannot see how to reconcile their claims, or even–for perhaps no one can solve that, or any other great problem exhaustively–how distinctly to state the question at issue.” Notoriously, her more philosophical contemporary would insist on the primacy of duty, a position that has cost her the devotion of many feminist readers today (Lee Edwards, for instance, who in her essay “Women, Energy, and Middlemarch,” famously declared that the novel could no longer be “one of the books of [her] life”).

One more passage, though for now I have no time to add commentary on it:

The specific peculiarity of Miss Brontë seems to be the power of revealing to us the potentiality of intense passions lurking behind the scenery of everyday life. Except in the most melodramatic–which is also the weakest–part of Jane Eyre, we have lives almost as uneventful as those of Miss Austen, and yet charged to the utmost with latent power. A parson at the head of a school-feast somehow shows himself as a “Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood;” a professor lecturing a governess on composition is revealed as a potential Napoleon; a mischievous schoolboy is obviously capable of developing into a Columbus or a Nelson; even the most commonplace natural objects, such as a row of beds in a dormitory, are associated and naturally associated with the most intense emotions. Miss Austen makes you feel that a tea-party in a country parsonage may be as amusing as the most brilliant meeting of cosmopolitan celebrities; and Miss Brontë that it may display characters capable of shaking empires and discovering new worlds. The whole machinery is in a state of the highest electric tension, though there is no display of thunder and lightning to amaze us.

Update: Today as I was editing Walter Bagehot’s 1860 essay on George Eliot, I was reminded that there is a fair amount of comparison of CB and GE there, though not really addressing the specific grounds of philosophical thinking. A brief example:

[In George Eliot’s novels], there is nothing of the Rembrandt-like style of Miss Brontë: the light flows far more equally over her pictures; we find nothing of the irregular emphasis with which Currer Bell’s characters are delineated, or of the strong subjective colouring which tinges all her scenes. George Eliot’s imagination, like Miss Brontë’s, loves to go to the roots of character, and portrays best by broad direct strokes; but there the likeness between them, so far as there is any, ends. The reasons for the deeper method and for the directer style are probably very different in the two cases. Miss Brontë can scarcely be said to have had any large instinctive knowledge of human nature:–her own life and thoughts were exceptional,–cast in a strongly-marked but not very wide mould; her imagination was solitary; her experience was very limited; and her own personality tinged all she wrote. She “made out” the outward life and manner of her dramatis personæ by the sheer force of her own imagination; and as she always imagined the will and the affections as the substance and centre of her characters, those of her delineations which are successful at all are deep, and their manner broad.
George Eliot’s genius is exceedingly different. There is but little of Miss Austen in her, because she has studied in a very different and much simpler social world; but there is in the springs of her genius at least more of Miss Austen than of Miss Brontë. Her genial, broad delineations of human life have more perhaps of the case of Fielding than of Miss Austen, or of any of the manners-painters of the present day. For these imagine life only as it appeals in a certain dress and manner, which are, as we said, a kind of artificial medium for their art,–life as affected by drawing-rooms. George Eliot has little, if any, of their capacity of catching the undertones and allusive complexity of this sort of society. But though she has observed the phases of a more natural and straightforward sphere of life, she draws her external life from observation, instead of imagining it, like Miss Brontë, out of the heart of the characters she wishes to paint.

Bagehot’s is a tremendously interesting essay. It contains, among other choice bits, his [in]famous remark about Maggie’s relationship with Stephen Guest in The Mill on the Floss being an “enthusiastic homage to physiological law, and seems to us as untrue to nature as it is unpleasant and indelicate”–a remark which is, in context, less prudish and more philosophically significant that it seems in its sound-bite form–but that’s a subject for another post altogether!

Academic Etiquette

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Wise words from the Little Professor on “dealing with professors“. My favourites:

3. If you want to know the assignment for the next day’s reading, please look at the syllabus. That’s why it’s there.

and

8. Do not ask your professor “Did I miss anything?” or “Will I miss anything?” or “Is there something important we’re going to talk about?” Just don’t.

Actually, I often have a version of #8 right there in my course syllabus…along with the list of books for the class, deadlines for assignments, my office hours, my policies on late assignments and missed classes, my mother’s maiden name, my home phone number…OK, not the last two, but I do work hard to put everything you need to know about the course in the syllabus, so really my basic advice would just be:

Before you ask me anything at all, read your syllabus carefully.

And since it’s posted on WebCT, it doesn’t matter if you left your copy on the bus, or your dog ate it, or you don’t think I gave you a copy last class: you can find it 24/7.

(This posting is dedicated to the anonymous student who complained in my course evaluations last year that whenever s/he asked me a question, I always said “go look in your syllabus.” In case you ever read this, there’s a relevant saying that is something about giving someone a fish vs. teaching them to fish…)

God’s Incompatible Warriors

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I’ve just finished watching the three installments of Christiane Amanpour’s CNN series “God’s Warriors,” and although I appreciated the information and the varied perspectives the series offered us, I ended up frustrated (though not surprised) that the most important question of all was never asked (or at least never aired), namely, “What makes you so sure that you are right in your beliefs and the guys in the other episodes are wrong?” Over and over her interviewees proclaimed their absolute conviction about what God wants of them, but they can’t all be right (and this applies not only across the three monotheisms that were her main topics but internally as well, as she met with Jews, Christians and Muslims who profess widely divergent views of the obligations and teachings of their own religions as well). Of course, the problem is that at bottom, their answers could only be of these three kinds:

  1. I’m absolutely sure I’m right because I have faith/belief; I feel it in my heart/soul.
  2. I’m absolutely sure I’m right because I was raised in these beliefs.
  3. I’m absolutely sure I’m right because I have read the infallible word of God in [fill in title of book here].

The first position gives us no way to distinguish the religious believer from someone who believes, say, that she is the reincarnation of Joan of Arc: the latter may be equally convinced on internal ‘evidence’ and strong feeling, but nonetheless we don’t hesitate to call her delusional. The second is really an admission that the person might well have believed something else altogether if raised in another family, parish, or country (as in fact we know to be the case, since religious beliefs vary widely according to geography). And the third simply returns us to the original problem–there’s more than one book that purports to be the definitive word of God, and they can’t all be it. How do you know that yours is the right one and your neighbour’s (or enemy’s) is not? Here we have people prepared to sacrifice their own lives, take the lives of others, engage in time-consuming, sometimes self-destructive, often expensive rituals, influence the outcome of elections, subvert the teaching of science, put their children at risk of STDs by denying them sex education…and on what solid basis? None at all. Overall, the series was very depressing. I ended up feeling a lot of sympathy for Richard Dawkins‘s provocative notion that religious education is a form of child abuse. We intervene to ensure medical treatment for children when their parents’ beliefs would deny it to them; why not consider it equally unacceptable for children to be raised to idealize martyrdom, or raised in dangerously controversial settlements in occupied Palestine, or denied the benefits of a modern scientific education because their parents cling to superstitious, magical ideas about the world and their role in it? There’s no question that, historically, religious belief has contributed to what George Eliot calls “the growing good of the world” as well as to its cruelties, irrationalities, and evils, but we can see now that the foundations of modern faiths are no stronger, no more defensible, than, say, the Greek or Roman beliefs in their deities (as Sam Harris likes to point out, we’re all atheists now with respect to Zeus and Poseidon). So why should we accept them as guides for living–or killing, or dying?

I hope Amanpour’s planning a follow-up series on “Reason’s Warriors.”

Blogging Trollope IV

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So much goes on in He Knew He Was Right that it’s hard for me to focus for long on any one point of interest while this reading of it is still so fresh. Since I’ve been remarking the novel’s relationship to sensation fiction, I’ll add that while I knew the main plot of the novel was ‘sensational,’ I was surprised at the way Trollope puts other sensational bits into the novel’s most comic segments and registers, especially the saga of Mr Gibson and the two Misses French. Here’s Camilla reflecting on Mr Gibson’s possible perfidy:

A sister, a mother, a promised lover, all false,–all so damnably, cruelly false! It was impossible. No history, no novel of most sensational interest, no wonderful villany that had ever been wrought into prose or poetry, would have been equal to this. It was impossible. She told herself so a score of times a day. And yet the circumstances were so terribly suspicious! (Ch. LXXIV)

As the tragic drama at Casalunga advances towards its painful conclusions, so too the ridiculous affair at Heavitree lurches along, until this:

The maid-servant, in making Miss Camilla’s bed and in ‘putting the room to rights,’ as she called it,–which description probably was intended to cover the circumstances of an accurate search,–had discovered, hidden among some linen,–a carving knife! . . . The knife [Camilla] declared, had been taken up-stairs, because she had wanted something very sharp to cut,–the bones of her stays. (Ch. LXXXII)

At times I found myself impatiently skimming these sections, as my interest and sympathies were far more engaged with the Trevelyans’ trials and, eventually, most of all with Nora and her steadfast determination to achieve a new (indeed, a manifestly modern) marriage with Hugh. But at the same time they pique my critical curiosity: are they simply diversions, a break into silliness to offset the sometimes lugubrious development of the ‘main’ plot? The overt mock-sensationalism suggests Trollope is having fun with generic conventions and disrupting the sensation/realism distinction he rejects in his critical writing (e.g. his Autobiography) while also amplifying many of his main themes, including the not-so-mock desperation of surplus women on the marriage market and the degradation of morals that results. Still, why do so comically, when the serious plot lines of the novel offer a pretty complete theme and variations along these lines? Perhaps the best answer is just “because he can.”

More evidence of self-consciousness about genre and form comes (in true Trollope style) through narrative intrusions. There aren’t many extended ones, at least for a novel of these proportions, but there’s a really good one at the opening of Chapter LXXXVIII:

It is rather hard upon readers that they should be thus hurried from the completion of hymeneals at Florence to the preparations for other hymeneals in Devonshire; but it is the nature of a complex story to be entangled with many weddings towards its close. [insert faint sigh of relief at the idea of ‘its close’] In this little history there are, we fear, three or four more to come. We will not anticipate by alluding prematurely to Hugh Stanbury’s treachery, or death,–or the possibility that he after all may turn out to be the real descendant of the true Lord Peterborough and the actual inheritor of the title and estate of Monkhams, nor will we speak of Nora’s certain fortitude under either of these emergencies. But the instructed reader must be aware that Camilla French ought to have a husband found for her; that Colonel Osborne should be caught in some matrimonial trap [there’s a motif that runs throughout the novel, sometimes without much hint of humour];–as, how otherwise should he be fitly punished? [and the number of characters who end up reflecting on marriage as a punishment or threat is actually remarkable]–and that something should at least be attempted for Priscilla Stanbury, who from the first has been intended to be the real heroine of these pages [interesting, that, since to me Nora emerges as the finest female character]. That Martha should marry Giles Hickbody, and Barty Burgess run away with Mrs MacHugh, is of course evident to the meanest novel-expounding capacity; but the fate of Brooke Burgess and of Dorothy will require to be evolved with some delicacy and much detail [do we detect a bit of glee in that last phrase, as he cracks his knuckles and settles in for another 100 pages?].

Trollope’s world has an odd and, in my reading experience, unique quality: his novels are at once so fully realized and capacious that he can link them together with coy little cross-references (in this one, we get both Phineas Finn and Lady Glencora, from the Pallisers series, and Bishop Proudie from Barchester), and so contrived and overt in their artifice that they defy what would otherwise seem simple categorization as ‘naive’ realism. It’s like being in some kind of virtual reality simulator, in which you are always aware at some level that you are playing a game but can look all around without really seeing its limits.

There’s no doubt this is a great novel to consider in a course on the ‘woman question’. It’s as direct in its confrontation with women’s political, social, and marital rights and obligations as any 19thC novel I know, if perhaps more ambiguous or ambivalent in its attitudes than some. But its 903 pages are difficulty simply to carry around, or hold while reading, and it’s hard to imagine just how to manage it pedagogically to maintain students’ enthusiasm when they are taking four other courses. If they’ve read Mill’s Subjection of Women and Cobbe and others on ‘old maids,’ though, along with the other novels I have in mind, won’t they find it irresistible? And failing those intellectual reasons, won’t they love it because of all the friends they’ll make reading it? I guess I’ll find out.

Blogging Trollope III

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I may just be preoccupied with these comparisons because of having spent so much time and thought on sensation novels this summer, but He Knew He Was Right continues to seem like a reworking of a number of key sensation themes and elements. (I haven’t looked around yet to see if there’s ‘official’ criticism addressing the connections.) I’m struck, for instance, by the close proximity between Louis Trevelyan and Robert Audley: both are motivated by intense suspicion of a woman and are driven to what others perceive as madness because of their relentless pursuit of justification for these suspicions. The key differences, of course, are first that Louis’s suspicions are groundless, and second, that his monomania thus truly puts him on the wrong side of what both authors describe as the thin line separating sanity from insanity. One result of these differences is that while Lady Audley’s Secret can be read as confirming all of Robert’s worst fears about women, He Knew He Was Right reads like an indictment of just those fears, a critique of that kind of misogynistic paranoia. The comparison brings out the darker side of Robert’s quest for justice: he is on a quest for control and domination as much as for truth, as is also clearly the case in HKHWR.

Blogging Trollope II

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The further I read (and I’m now about 2/3 through, which is no small feat, let me tell you), the more I am enjoying thinking about how He Knew He Was Right would play off against the other novels I have in mind for my class. It’s a seminar on the Victorian ‘woman question,’ and I have taught it several times before, always with a reading list that includes a fair mix of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose. I have always thought (and the students have always seemd to agree) that it has been successful, and discussion has always been vigorous, but I decided it was time for a change, and so this time I’m focusing on novels, and in particular on novels that follow couples past the ‘matrimonial barrier.’ That means I’ll keep The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and The Odd Women, two of my favourites, but I’m going to replace The Mill on the Floss with Middlemarch and (I’m now thinking) bring in HKHWR…and maybe East Lynne also, for a more ‘sensational’ take. I’m finding HKHWR has a lot of links to The Odd Women in particular, starting with the obvious similarity of an excess of female characters. The notes to my edition of HKHWR suggest links between Priscilla Stanbury and Dorothea in Middlemarch; at the moment I don’t really see it, but I’m interested in the possibility. East Lynne has an actual infidelity that would provide an interesting comparison with the suspected offense in Trollope’s much more literal (and yet, in many ways, ‘sensational’) novel. If the students don’t get completely overwhelmed with the reading load, this could be a lot of fun. (That does seem like a big ‘if’ at this point. Well, I haven’t actually ordered the books yet, so there’s time to pull back.)

Blogging Trollope I

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I’m rereading He Knew He Was Right with an eye to assigning it in a winter term class. I have remarked a couple of times on this blog that there’s something about Trollope that makes his novels not entirely amenable to the kinds of critical analysis we are most accustomed to. For one thing, he’s (almost) all about plot and character–there’s a tremendously literal quality about his approach that makes much reading between the lines seem beside the point. I have always loved his accounts of walking in the woods imagining what his characters would do and say in the scenes to come, and his insistence that his people were entirely real to him; once I am immersed in one of these big blockbuster books, its very expansiveness, almost excessiveness, gives me the same sense of having spent my time among actual people whose lives have all the dimensions of ours. Here’s a little example from fairly early on in HKHWR that contributes to this sense that Trollope is putting his immediate plot together by selecting among dozens, even hundreds or thousands, of untold stories; this is a bit of background on the wonderful Miss Jemima Stanbury (“All change was to her hateful and unncessary”!):

It need not be told here how various misfortunes arose, how Mr. Burgess quarrelled with the Stanbury family, how Jemima quarrelled with her own family, how, when her father died, she went out from Nuncombe Putney parsonage, and lived on the smallest pittance in a city lodging, how her lover was untrue to her and did not marry her, and how at last he died and left her every shilling that he possessed. (Ch. VII)

Of course the story is “told here” after all, but he passess off in one paragraph what could easily be enough plot for another whole novel–it’s just that he is telling us a different one and sets this one aside. Though it is in a much more comic register, this passage reminds me of the bit in Carlyle’s French Revolution about the five act tragedy inside every man, or of the roar on the other side of silence evoked (again, with quite a different tone) in Middlemarch. If there can seem to be a certain formlessness about the way his novels just keep going on and on and on and on (I have been known to refer to him as the “Energizer Bunny” of Victorian fiction), at the same time they capture in their own way that notion of the multitudinousness of human experience and stories.

Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer

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This book has a simple premise–that the best way for aspiring writers to learn their craft is to read (closely, attentively, alertly, appreciatively) the work of other novelists. Prose proceeds to elaborate on what she sees as the pedagogical benefit of close reading by moving through a sequence of chapters addressing specific aspects of novel-writing, each illustrated with examples from writers she admires. Her intended audience is primarily creative writing students; she offers her close-reading approach as a counter-balance to what she describes as the fundamentally negative tactics of writing workshops: “Though it also doles out praise, the writing workshop most often focuses on what a writer has done wrong, what needs to be fixed, cut, or augmented. Whereas reading a masterpiece can inspire us by showing us how a writer does something brilliantly” (11). I’m not in a position to evaluate how well either strategy would work for someone trying to produce an original work of fiction, though it does seem to me that Prose’s emphasis on writing as a craft that presents technical challenges needing to be acknowledged and worked through intellectually (rather than transcended through inspiration) is probably useful.

Prose’s subtitle (“A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them”) suggests that she also hopes to appeal to and help out avid readers (the same ones who might pick up Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel or Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel. It may be this hope that leads Prose to avoid most specialized vocabulary. For instance, in her chapter on narration, she acknowledges briefly that there are types of narrators (“should the narrator be first or third person, close or omniscient?” [85]) but does not explain in any systematic way just what these options are or that they are not exhaustive. As a result, her discussion of examples tends towards the impressionistic, rather than the analytical; she often seems to take for granted, too, that her reader will recognize the qualities she admires or finds effective, that she does not need to explain or justify her praise or her interpretation. Here is some of her commentary on a long quotation from Richard Price’s Freedomland:

Everything in the paragraph contributes to the speaker’s credibility, as a fictional character and as an honest human being: the diction, the rhythms, the slight repetitions for emphasis, the way that the tenses keep shifting from present to past and back. The choice of words and phrases (“used to like his cocktails,” “never raised a hand,” “passed on”) make us feel that this is how this woman might really recount an incident from her life. The language, the story itself, the specificity of the details (Jimmy Durante singing “September Song”) convince us that the woman is telling the truth. (91)

I can tell that she is convinced, but she has not explained the basis of her conviction to me in a persuasive or useful way. What aspects of the speaker’s diction are indicative of credibility and honesty? Why should including specific details convince us that someone is telling the truth? What are the signposts of unreliability?

I was also concerned at times about the qualities of Prose’s own reading. In some cases, she seemed to me an unduly trusting reader. Here’s some of her commentary on the opening scene of Pride and Prejudice, for example:

Lest we receive a skewed or harsh impression of the Bennets’ own marriage, Mr. Bennet compliments his wife by suggesting that she is as handsome as their daughters. In fact, as we are discovering, theirs is a harmonious union, and indeed the whole conversation, with its intimacy, its gentle teasing, and with Mr. Bennet’s joking reference to his old friendship with his wife’s nerves, is a double portrait of a happy couple. (127)

Well, maybe, and the same needs to be said about her confidence in Nelly Dean as “the most credible witness” in Wuthering Heights. But she writes well about the significance of details (they “aren’t only the building blocks with which a story is put together, they’re also clues to something deeper, keys not merely to our subconscious but to our historical moment” [207].

I think that what struck me as weaknesses in the book, particularly in its analysis of particular examples, come at least in part from Prose’s own deliberate distancing of herself from academic approaches to literature. “Only once,” she tells us in her account of her own development as a writer,

did my passion for reading steer me in the wrong direction, and that was when I let it persuade me to go to graduate school. There, I soon realized that my love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I found it hard to understand what they did love, exactly, and this gave me an anxious shiver that would later seem like a warning about what would happen to the teaching of literature over the decade or so after I dropped out of my Ph.D. program. That was when literary academia split into warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and so forth, all battling for the right to tell students that they were reading “texts” in which ideas and politics trumped what the writer had actually written. (8)

I have written before on this blog about my own frustrations with aspects of “literary academia,” but I have also resisted (even resented) this kind of dismissive attitude to scholarly and theoretical expertise. It is possible to turn such expertise (including attention to ideas and politics) precisely to understanding “what the writer had actually written,” and the result will be a better, fuller reading–and thus, if Prose’s own pedagogical theory is correct, better new books.

 

Becoming George?

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

I was interviewed recently by our campus news service about Becoming Jane–not about the movie exactly (fortunately, as I haven’t actually seen it) but about Austen’s popular appeal. I found myself thinking that really, if movie makers (and movie audiences) want a bio-pic about a woman writer’s interesting, sexy life, they should really be working on Becoming George. Isn’t the transformation of country girl (and preachy evangelical) Marianne Evans into leading intellectual, free-thinker, strong-minded woman, and renowned novelist George Eliot really as good as (really, better than) anything someone could make up about a 19th-century woman’s life, and true, to boot (which is more than can confidently be said about Becoming Jane)? If I were directing, I’d begin (and possibly end) with Marian and Lewes leaving on the boat for Germany in 1854:

George: “You know what they’ll say about us–about you…There’s no going back from a step like this; it will mean the end of your life as a respectable woman.”

Marian: “I’ve made my decision. And every ending is also a beginning…”

And then flashbacks (with lots of voice-overs drawing on her letters and diaries) to take us from her childhood through her intellectual awakening and ‘holy war’, to her life among the London intellegentsia, the interlude with Chapman (I guess there would need to be some speculative in-filling there), the disastrous ‘romance’ with Herbert Spencer, and the development of her relationship with Lewes, complete with asides about his unconventional domestic arrangements. The story has everything: rebellion, romance, and ideas. Casting would be challenging, of course. You’d need someone graceful, charismatic, low-voiced, and plain for the main part (sorry, no place for Anne Hathaway here), and someone sprightly, charismatic, maybe slightly manic, and homely for Lewes (any ideas?).

Such a film would accomplish for a general audience what one of her contemporaries (reviewing John Cross’s biography) hoped for: “the salt and spice will be restored to the records of George Eliot’s entirely unconventional life.” It might even send people to her novels with a new appreciation for what she risked and achieved in them. Of course it will never happen, will it? Too bad! But then, apparently there is a big-screen version of Middlemarch in the works, so maybe her time is coming.