I read with much interest Dan Cohen’s post “Professors, Start Your Blogs” (now a year old, but new to me). I appreciated his discussion of the reasons academics might not only want to blog but also justify blogging. He is particularly clear and persuasive about the merits of bringing specialized knowledge, even obsessions (if “properly channeled and focused on a worthy subject”), to a wider audience. The idea of bloggers in well-defined niches becoming “a nexus for information exchange in their field[s]” makes intuitive sense and seems to be borne out by examples, including those he gives. At the same time, he points to what he calls “altruistic reasons” for blogging, reaching out to “an enormous audience beyond academia. . . . I believe it’s part of our duty as teachers, experts, and public servants.” I agree, but it strikes me that his two kinds of reasons (call them obsession and outreach) are not wholly compatible. The high degree of specialization in academia is one of the main reasons academic research is not particularly accessible, never mind interesting, to broad audiences. My own interest in blogging is motivated largely by a desire to escape or redefine the limits of specialization, not to reproduce them in an alternative medium. Cohen’s account of what makes a blog successful exacerbates my ongoing concern, though, that there’s not much point competing with thousands of other blogs for readers’ attention unless your own site offers something distinctive, some angle or attitude they can’t find anywhere else. To use my own blog as an example, I enjoy writing up my latest reading and I find it useful posting about subjects related to my embryonic project on ‘writing for readers,’ but if my ultimate goal is to provide something that will, in Cohen’s words, “frame discussions on a topic and point to resources of value,” I’m going to need to narrow, or at least define, my focus–ideally, in a way that still satisfies my desire to get out of the ivory tower and into a wider conversation.
Cynthia Ozick, “Puttermesser Paired”
Not ever having been a regular reader of The New Yorker, I learned only belatedly about Puttermesser, but as soon as I read a review of The Puttermesser Papers I knew I had to read “Puttermesser Paired.” Who could resist a romance based on reading biographies of George Eliot? It sounded like Possession for the poetry-impaired. Now that I’ve read it, I know that it is indeed something like Posession, though odder and starker and (impossibly) more intellectual. Like Byatt, Ozick explores excesses of readerly identification, of readers driven by desires that are themselves generated or given form by reading, but no less real, or really felt, because of that–how else do we imagine what we want, after all, if not through stories? In Possession, the knowingness is mostly on Byatt’s part, and on the readers’; we enjoy ourselves at the expense of the 20th-century characters and their obsessions, which inevitably complicates our pleasure at the 19th-century romance. Ozick’s 20th-century characters, in contrast, seem much more in control of the ironies in their story–or at any rate Puttermesser does (I’m not quite sure about Rupert). And while Byatt’s story turns on the convergence of sexual and scholarly desire, with both characterized as consuming and possessive and thus potentially destructive, I appreciate the way Ozick’s story examines the relationship between Eliot and Lewes as “a marriage of two minds”:
They read until they were dried up. They read until their eyes skittered and swelled. The strangeness in it did not elude them: where George Eliot and George Lewes in their nighttime coziness had taken up Scott, Trollope, Balzac, Turgenev, Daudet, Sainte-Beuve, Madame d’Agoult (Lewes recorded all this in his diary), she and Rupert read only the two Georges. Puttermesser discussed what this might mean. It wasn’t for “inspiration,” she pointed out–she certainly wasn’t mixing herself up with a famous dead Victorian. She was conscious of her Lilliputian measur: a worn-out city lawyer, stunted as to real experience, a woman lately secluded, eaten up with loneliness, melancholia ground into the striations of her face. The object was not inspiration but something sterner. The object was just what it had been for the two Georges: study. What Puttermesser and Rupert were studying was a pair of heroic boon companions. Boon companions! It was fellowship they were studying; it was nearness.
Meta-Criticism: A Complaint!
Often when I make good faith efforts to re-kindle my interest in and appreciation for academic criticism, I experience what I’ve come to think of as a “Reverse Godfather”: just when I think I’m back in, they keep pushing me out! In today’s episode, I was doing some catch-up on new releases in Victorian studies, with an eye to my upcoming course on sensation fiction, so [a new book on sensation fiction] caught my attention. Happily for me (I thought) its introduction is freely available online, so I start reading along, only to find my interest slipping away and my attention wandering as [the author] develops an argument that turns out to be every bit as much about criticism as about Victorian novels. In fact, for long stretches of the introduction she offers criticism of criticism of criticism–that is, she examines and critiques the premises and procedures of review essays on recent work in Victorian studies. Is it just me, or does this sound like a variation on navel-gazing in which the object of said gaze is just someone else’s navel? [The author] describes the book’s project overall as “literary criticism that reads itself reading the Victorians.” I’m sorry, but the thought of reading literary criticism reading itself reading the Victorians is just not appealing. I’m going to go read an actual book instead.
Follow-up: This little piece got a lot more attention than any other post I’ve put up here. I’ve been feeling uneasy, as a result, because it was meant more as an outburst of frustration with a genre (academic literary criticism) than an attack on [this] book in particular, but this distinction is blurred in my original post. As I said in a comment on Dan Green’s “The Reading Experience,” as an academic book, [this one] seems better than most (at least the introduction does, which is as far as I’ve read at this point). For starters, it makes an original argument and is clearly written. My impatience is with the layers of self-conscious meta-commentary that are now required in academic criticism: it can feel like you are looking at literature through bubble-wrap. [The author] has to do something like this to succeed professionally (though perhaps she’s fine with that, and would not do otherwise even if she had the choice). But at the same time such an approach pretty much guarantees that the book won’t be of much interest to anyone outside the profession. It is this double-bind that frustrates me the most and that has motivated me to engage in the meta-critical project I myself have underway, as I try to rethink how and why we write about books. (July 24, 2007)
Final follow-up: I continue to regret having singled out a particular critic in this post and it occurred to me belatedly that I could at least edit out the specific references. I can’t change the peevish tone of the post, but I hope there’s evidence elsewhere on this blog of my better self. I’m not done thinking about genres of criticism, but (though for different reasons) I agree with the last anonymous comment–“Enough!”–at least with this post as its starting point. (August 7, 2007)
Carol Shields, Unless
A recent talk with a good friend sent me back to my bookshelf to revisit Carol Shields’s Unless, which I remembered having found not wholly convincing. My reaction on this re-reading was the same, though the novelistic intelligence evident throughout engaged me more fully this time. My problem here is the opposite of my complaint about ‘chick lit’ (absence of ideas): Shields’s novel is too conspicuously driven by an idea, specifically an idea about the way women are rendered trivial, condemned (as the narrator Reta says in one of her interspersed letters) to a “solitary state of non-belonging.” The novel does not have a feminist sub-text: it is, both artfully and overtly, a feminist novel. Reta confronts her “smarmy” New York editor about her next novel featuring her characters Roman and Alicia–bound, on her initial conception, for marriage, but now redirected by her epiphanic realization that Alicia must be granted her singleness:
“I am talking about Roman being the moral centre of this book, and Alicia, for all her charms, is not capable of that role, surely you can see that. She writes fashion articles. She talks to her cat. She does yoga. She makes rice casseroles.”
“It’s because she’s a woman.”
“That’s not an issue at all. Surely you–“
“But it is the issue.”
“. . . A reader, the serious reader that I have in mind, would never accept her as the decisive fulcrum of a serious work of art that acts as a critique of our society while, at the same time, unrolling itself like a carpet of inevitability, narrativistically speaking.”
“Because she’s a woman.”
“Not at all, not at all.”
“Because she’s a woman.”
The reflexivity of this moment is palpable: can we take Reta herself–who calms herself through housekeeping, who cooks lasagna, who mothers her children–seriously as a moral fulcrum? Can her story offer a social critique that reaches beyond the personal? Or, perhaps, should we want it to, as the novel, even as it chafes against cliches about women novelists being “miniaturists of feeling” (from another of Reta’s letters), refuses to reach out and claim its larger issues in larger ways? Doesn’t Shields, in avoiding bolder confrontation with the global and ideological issues that lurk around the edges of her plot (admittedly, as they typically lurk around the edges of our lives), allow her novel to settle into something like comfortable domestic realism? The woman in a burka who sets herself alight and thus precipitates Norah’s (and, in turn, Reta’s) crisis: surely in a post-9/11 novel to choose such an incident to stand for women’s desperation is no accident, but no more is made of her than that, a symbol–and an occasion for Norah’s and Reta’s meditations on goodness, rather a reductive and objectifying gesture, and one that conflates Reta’s rather abstruse complaints (women writers and thinkers are undervalued in the history of literature and philosophy!) with the truly devastating limitations on personal freedom, individualism, and wellbeing we can imagine would motivate a Muslim woman to self-immolation.
And yet at the same time as I felt Shields allowed some of the (potential) substance of the novel to become insubstantial, I felt irritated at the novel’s didacticism on its main theme, and inclined to quarrel with its insistence that despite apparent gains, women continue to exist on the margins of power and discourse. “Not so,” I kept wanting to interject, and especially when the tone and art of the novel seemed to suffer from Shields’s polemical intent. “I need to speak further about this problem of women,” Reta begins one chapter, “how they are dismissed and excluded from the most primary of entitlements.” Is my resistance to these persistent iterations the result of a generational difference? Wishful thinking, or ignorance? Whatever its cause, it distanced me from the novel.
And yet (again), there are moments and expressions in the novel that sparked poignant recognition in me, that made me reach for my notebook to jot them down for later reference. (“This is why I read novels,” Reta reflects: “so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.”) And Norah’s story, though ostensibly the occasion for Reta’s narrative rather than a “fulcrum” in its own right, strikes me as a creative and appropriate working out of George Eliot’s line about the “roar on the other side of silence” that Shields takes as her epigraph. If the novel irritated and frustrated me at times, I think it was because I wanted a different kind of book, one that gave me these people and their stories in more Eliot-like depth, with more picture and less diagram. But I’m aware, too, because the novel is also about novels and what we want from them and how we theorize and criticism them, that Shields is resisting that kind of book and offering this one instead, and I respect and appreciate her invitation to her readers to think as well as to feel.
Susan Minot, Evening
Seeing the previews for the new movie of Evening reminded me that the novel had been sitting on my shelf “ripening” for a few years, so I decided it was time to read it. While I was reading it, I kept thinking that it was a very odd choice for a movie adaptation, dedicated as it is to rendering the dying protagonist’s consciousness, the meandering and then occasionally piercing or flashing experience of her memories and feelings. The prose and the story combine to make reading the novel an intense and often moving process, and I thought (I guess I still think) that the care Minot has lavished on telling details and on exploring the ultimately lonely experience of subjectivity will inevitably be lost when the story is translated or reduced to its action (for some reason I’m sure that the car accident will feature prominently in the film version). Since finishing it last night, though, I’ve engaged in some co-duction with myself and become increasingly dissatisfied with the novel. It seems to me that Minot’s care has already been lavished on an undeserving subject, in this respect at least: the relationship that Ann describes as “the highest point” in her life is, basically, an unlikely and cliched interlude of sexual ecstasy with another woman’s fiance–and the emotional force of the novel relies on our accepting that this brief affair with a near stranger matters more than anything else that has happened in her life since then. Here’s an excerpt from one of the culminating scenes:
She swam through the water and let cold reason take over and the heart which had asked for too much left her behind and when she emerged from the water on the rocky beach she had let go of it and there was a new version in her, a sort of second heart. She went in with one heart and came out with a second heart inside. (246)
Is the idea really that as a result of this youthful romance, which he calls off in favour of his pregnant girlfriend, she has turned away from feeling (the wisdom of the heart?) and allowed herself, oh so wrongly, to be governed by “cold reason” (the wisdom of the head?)? Even putting aside this improbably absolute separation of head and heart, the whole scenario turns out, despite the beautiful prose, to be no better than a Hollywood cliche or a fairy tale fantasy about true love–meaning that, after all, it’s not such a bad subject for a sentimental ‘weeper’ movie. All of the moral complications, the difficult weighing and balancing of duties and principles against feelings and impulses, seem to be set aside, while being swept away by passion becomes the highest ideal, the life most worth living (it’s hard for me not to think about the way George Eliot handles a similar situation, in a wholly different philosophical and literary style, in The Mill on the Floss). Maybe there’s a layer of thought in the novel in which Ann’s memories of her love for Harris Arden are ironized or critiqued; it’s true that we do learn that Harris never felt as strongly, for example. But at this point my judgment is that the novel is beautiful and evocative and yet, sadly, insubstantial.
George Eliot: The Friendly Face of Unbelief
I’ve read a number of reviews lately on the spate of books by the ‘new atheists,’ notably Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and, most recently, Christopher Hitchens. Among the many interesting features of these reviews is how often they protest against the tone of the books, even if they agree with their arguments. A lot of people seem worried that a world without religion will be either a coldly austere, heartless place, or a chaotic place with no moral principles or values drawing people into communities. The complaints about the harsh tone of these books seem motivated by these fears, as well as by the widespread (but, as Harris especially would argue, misguided) attitude that whatever our own views on religion, we ought to treat it with respect. They are also often accompanied by the complaint that writers like Dawkins and Harris are taking away beliefs that bring comfort or satisfy emotional and aesthetic needs, without offering up anything to replace them.
I don’t personally think there is any obligation for critics of religion to be nice, or for them to make up for whatever people may feel has been taken away from them along with their superstitions. And, in fact, all three of the writers I have named have plenty to say about ways an atheistic worldview can enhance, rather than inhibit, our emotional, moral, and aesthetic experiences and sensibilities. But it’s clear that their case is not always persuasive, particularly to those readers who most need persuading. Because I think the world would benefit if they were victorious in their campaign on behalf of reason and evidence, I think they should call in some allies who can help them past what may be primarily a problem of genre. In addition to making the case against religion, they need to help people move imaginatively towards a world in which it is no longer necessary. Who better to assist in this endeavour than George Eliot, who was, as noted by one of her contemporaries, “the first great godless writer of fiction”?
Of the three writers I’ve named, Hitchens makes the most explicit appeal to literature. In god is not Great, he remarks that atheists “are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books” (5). Later, he notes that the “study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected” (283). This general position is one with which I have great sympathy; it is also one which, though without explicit reference to replacing theistic moral systems, is much considered in the work of contemporary moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum who are exploring the contributions literary forms make towards our ethical understanding. But Hitchens could get a lot more specific about just how George Eliot is useful to his project. Here are some excerpts from my paper “George Eliot: Moralist for the 21st Century” that suggest how her ideas, particularly as given literary form through her fiction, might complement his and the others’ work and contribute to forming what Ronald Aronson in The Nation describes as “coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life’s vital questions.”
[A recent University of Minnesota study] found that many people consider atheists “self-interested individuals who are not concerned with the common good” (Edgell et al. 227). The researchers conclude that “Americans construct the atheist as the symbolic representation of one who rejects the basis for moral solidarity and cultural membership in American society altogether” (230). However contingent the relationship between morality and religion may seem in academic or philosophic circles (witness the decisive critiques of divine command theory in analytic ethics, for example), most of our real-world compatriots are convinced that morality will break down without religion, with dire consequences for human flourishing. To correct this mistake—to lay these fears to rest—we could really use George Eliot’s help.
As her contemporaries noted, George Eliot’s novels portray “a world of high endeavour, pure morality, and strong enthusiasm, existing and in full work, without any reference to, or help from, the thought of God” (Mallock 698). After her own de-conversion from Christianity, Eliot worked tirelessly to develop a secular, humanistic framework for morality. As is well known, she believed, with Feuerbach, that people have given the name “God” to qualities and aspirations of their own, that motives and accomplishments called “religious” and credited to supernatural forces are really the products of human effort, of the human capacity for generosity, sympathy, and love—but also egotism, pettiness, and hatred. In her deterministic universe, we are responsible for our own deeds and their consequences, for our own contributions to, or obstructions of, the “growing good of the world” (Finale). She rejected extrinsic motives for good behaviour, including appeals to the “glory of God” or hope of an afterlife, arguing eloquently that “the immediate impulse of love or justice … alone makes an action truly moral” (rev. of Constance Herbert 322). These are components of an ethos that seems highly conducive to “moral solidarity” and “the common good.”
More important than her specific conclusions, though, is her resolve to work with the facts of human existence rather than comforting fictions. She did not deny the austerity of non-belief, but she agrees with Harris that “the fact that unjustified beliefs can have a consoling influence on the human mind is no argument in their favour” (67). The “‘highest calling and election’,” she asserted, “is to do without opium and live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance” (Letter 254).
Other examples of George Eliot’s own statements on the relationship between faith and morality include this, from “Worldiness and Other-Worldiness: The Poet Young”:
‘And in opposition to your theory that a belief in immortality is the only source of virtue, I maintain that, so far as moral action is dependent on that belief, so far the emotion which prompts it is not truly moral—is still in the stage of egoism, and has not yet attained the higher development of sympathy. In proportion as a man would care less for the rights and the welfare of his fellow, if he did not believe in a future life, in that proportion is he wanting in the genuine feelings of justice and benevolence…’
And this, from her letters, a simple statement that would have revolutionary consequences if applied instead of many of the doctrines put forward in the world’s sacred books:
Our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joys.
These are all philosophical statements, but George Eliot opted to give her ideas fictional form so that we would not just understand them intellectually, but experience them as principles operating in the world of human feelings, histories, and relationships. I have written more about this choice elsewhere. For my purposes now, I’ll just say that this choice of genres allows her to show us morality and community both flourishing and faltering as the result of human character and human choices. The mathematician Laplace famously replied to Napoleon, when asked about the role of God in his view of the universe, that he had “no need of that hypothesis.” Through her novels, George Eliot helps us understand that we too have no need of it, and that we will do better by ourselves and by others when we acknowledge our own responsibility for the world we live in and the rules we live by.
Criticism as ‘Coduction’
I have remarked a couple of times that Wayne Booth‘s idea of ‘coduction’ seems to me to capture something important about the way thoughtful literary criticism unfolds. I was reminded of this yet again reading Dan Green’s lastest posting on the ethics of book reviewing, in which he proposes that any review that aspires to the status of criticism must take into account what other reviewers have said. As discussed in my previous post, one distinction between reviewing and criticism is that the critic may be aiming at explication rather than evaluation, while the main expectation most of us have of a review is that it will culminate in and justify a judgment. I think Booth would argue that criticism is always at least implicitly judgmental. In any case, here’s some of what he says about the process by which “we arrive at our sense of value in narratives”:
Even in my first intuition of ‘this new one,’ whether a story or a person, I see it against a backdrop of my long personal history of untraceably complex experiences of other stories and persons. Thus my initial acquaintance is comparative even when I do not think of comparisons. If I then converse with others about their impressions–if, that is, I move toward a public ‘criticism’–the primary intuition (with its implicit acknowledgment of value) can be altered in at least three ways: it can become conscious and more consciously comparative…; it can become less dependent on my private experience…; and it can be related to principles and norms…. Every appraisal of a narrative is implicitly a comparison between the always complex experience we have had in its presence and what we have known before. (The Company We Keep, pp. 70-71)
It’s not that the ‘primary intuition’ (especially of a reader with an already rich ‘personal history’ of literature and criticism) is invalid; it’s that putting that intuition into dialogue with other ideas enriches it and complicates it, and makes it better–more “serious,” to use Green’s word.
Just as a bit of an aside, this idea that criticism is not finite or absolute but always in process, part of an ongoing conversation, is what makes a medium such as a blog seem appropriate for it. Conventional academic publishing inhibits any real exchange of views, first because its pace is so unbelievably slow that by the time anything you write appears in print you can barely remember what you said or why you said it, and second because you have to at least sound as if you think what you’ve said is definitive. Hardly anybody reads most academic criticism, either, even within the academy (half the time it seems the real audience is the person who reads only the title, on your cv…).
More on the Purpose of Criticism
Some time ago I posted some thoughts on Cynthia Ozick’s Harper’s essay “Literary Entrails” (see “Academic Criticism Criticized”). Belatedly, I notice that there was a good posting in response to it at Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading which concludes that “Ozick’s better criticism . . . would add another reason to read, a further way to engage a book once it had been closed and to continually re-think and re-evaluate books that have been around for a while. This might not bring any new readers into the fold, but it might make better readers out of those who already do so. Over time, I think that would make books better for everyone.” I like the idea that the critic’s role is to keep us engaged and to encourage us to “re-think and re-evaluate” what we have read; as both this author and Ozick emphasize, the pace of reviewing can be too hasty to allow for a “slower, more contemplative critical approach to literature.” For myself, I have been finding it exhausting trying to keep pace at all with the texts and topics addressed in litblogs and literary journals: I’m starting to look forward to the start of the teaching term in September because I will be back to worrying obsessively over a small handful of books, and to feel grateful for “the canon,” however unstable or elastic its definition, if only because the very idea of a canon implies that there is no obligation to pay attention to everything!
Meanwhile, at The Reading Experience, Dan Green has some good things to say about the distinction between reviewing and criticism: “The essential task of criticism is not to evaluate fiction. It is an essential task of reviewing, but criticism can take place entirely outside the context of judgment and evaluation, or at least it can take place in a context that assumes evaluation and judgment have already taken place. Some of the best criticism attempts not to argue for the merits of a particular work but to describe and analyze a work the critic already values and wants to “read” more closely. Sometimes this results in convincing readers of the quality of the work, but doing that has not been the critic’s primary task.” I like to think in terms of appreciation rather than evaluation, because it sidelines the issue of taste. I can appreciate a work of fiction for being artful, well-crafted, original, historically significant, etc. without actually liking it (Pamela, anyone?). Yet I am unlikely to devote a lot of critical time (or classroom time) to any text that I am not personally convinced has value, whether artistic, intellectual, social, or some combination. We value different books for different reasons, after all. I’m not sure I’d want to convince anyone of the quality of, say, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, though I enjoy reading and teaching it and consider it an important example of Victorian social problem fiction. On the other hand, I find I am prepared to expend a great deal of energy convincing people of the value of Bleak House or Middlemarch! Of course, when past works are the ones at issue, there’s presumably no longer any question of reviewing them–or is there? Actually, that’s an interesting question, and one linked to my ongoing musings about the potential role of something like a blog in my own work. How or why could writing about a ‘classic’ be relevant, useful, desirable to a contemporary audience? I still hold to the fairly simple distinction that reviewing is a form of literary journalism that requires a specific occasion as an incentive, while criticism has more abstract (longitudinal?) interests. In any case, I like Green’s comment that criticism is “a way of paying attention and of perhaps assisting others in the effort to pay closer attention.” Like the comments at Conversational Reading, this one reminds me of Booth’s idea of “coduction,” which seems to me an excellent model of the way our judgments of literature are in fact formed and reformed.
Joanna Trollope, A Village Affair
When I decided to take a break from more “serious” reading with A Village Affair, I wasn’t really expecting the novel to reach towards the serious itself. I had read it before, but what I had retained was admiration for the clarity with which Trollope gives us the people she has devised: many (though not all) of her novels that I have read have struck me as achieving an enviable quality in their characters: they are enormously specific and individual and often intensely, even poignantly, believable. Here, Alice’s father-in-law, Richard, seems especially well conceived. Everything he says communicates to us who he is and how he has lived, particularly in his marriage to a woman he persists in loving but who cannot, in her turn, recognize in him someone as complex and fully human as she is. He lives this hampered life in full knowledge of its limits, neither tragic nor stoic. Alice’s discontent is the stuff of cliches; her affair seems contrived (by the author) to break up the seemingly calm surface, the routines and compromises of daily life. In fact, this is how Trollope’s plots generally work: the ordinary people, the change or revelation, the repercussions. For me, it’s the repercussions she does really well. Having set up her experiment in life, she works out plausibly how it will play out, and she does not sentimentalize–as, in this case, Alice’s “coming alive” through a new and different experience of love creates more problems than it solves.
In this case, as in another of her novels that I think is very smart, Marrying the Mistress, Trollope sets her characters up to confront what is a central dilemma in many 19th-century novels as well, namely how to resolve the conflict between, or how to decide between, duty to self and duty to others. That she is aware of her predecessors in this investigation is indicated by the quotation from Adam Bede recited (OK, improbably) by one of the characters in A Village Affair. As that quotation forcefully indicates, George Eliot placed a high value on renunciation and on accepting (as gracefully as possible) the burden of duty: resignation to less than you want, or less than you can imagine, is a constant refrain, and this with no promise of rapturous happiness. Hence the melancholic tinge at the end of Romola, for instance, or Daniel Deronda, or, for all its lightning flashes of romantic fulfilment, Middlemarch. (Of course, famously, it is her heroines who must resign or, like Maggie Tulliver, die.)
Although much has changed socially and politically since George Eliot found it unrealistic to give Romola, Maggie, or Dorothea uncompromised happy endings, the struggle between what we want for ourselves and what is expected or demanded of us by others continues to be a staple of fiction. Though Trollope’s scenario is much more contemporary, she too accepts that one’s individual desire cannot (or not easily, or not ethically) be one’s guiding principle, because of the “visible and invisible relations beyond any of which our present or prospective self is the centre” (Adam Bede). So Trollope, with admirable restraint, refuses a fairy tale ending for her protagonist, though, with a different kind of insistence that perhaps George Eliot would respect, she also pushes her out of the unsatisfactory life that was her reality before, and into what, given this context, seems like a narrative limbo, or a waiting room. This is not to say that Alice’s single life is an incomplete one, but she herself acknowledges that it is not, in fact, what she really wanted–only what she was capable of achieving.
I think this novel makes an interesting comparison to another quiet novel about a woman reconsidering her life, Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years, which I have always admired. But Tyler, though far from offering simplistic fairy tales, offers her own version of the resignation narrative. In Ladder of Years, as in Back When We Were Grownups, it proves mistaken for the heroine to try to start a new life, however much she is, or believes she is, following the promptings of her innermost self. Again, the “visible and invisible relations” exert a powerful pressure, like the entangling webs of family and society in Middlemarch but perceived, overall, as more kindly, less petty and destructive. The plain litte room Delia takes and uses as a staging ground to reinvent her life is a room of her own, but her story is not rightly understood as being just about her own life (“was she alone,” Dorothea asks herself). In these novels Tyler’s women learn to appreciate the value of what they tried to leave, to see their own identities as having become inseparable from those of the others whose demands and complications hamper their desires. The vision seems starker in Trollope’s novel (“Aga saga” though it certainly is).
Blogging Reservations
Today’s New York Sun includes a short piece by Adam Kirsh on The Scorn of the Literary Blog. Kirsh is mostly writing about the much-noted rivalry between “professional” reviewers and literary bloggers, in the context of the also much-noted decline of book sections in print journalism. I don’t have much to say about these broader contexts, but I am interested in Kirsh’s remarks on the limitations of blogging as a form of literary criticism:
The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature, and it is no coincidence that there is no literary blogger with the audience and influence of the top political bloggers. For one thing, literature is not news the way politics is news — it doesn’t offer multiple events every day for the blogger to comment on. For another, bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve. The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.
That last bit seems disingenuous, as the links in fact take us to electronic versions of the longer pieces which are themselves seamlessly integrated into the web versions of journals, which include many features typical of blogs, including opportunities to comment and links to other related materials.
I agree that it makes a difference that “literature is not news” and that this distinction has implications for the kind of criticism that works on blogs. Literature can be news, in the sense that new books come out all the time and one function of book reviews is to let readers know about them. But not all kinds of literary criticism serve this market-oriented function. It’s not obvious to me that all blogs do either: many of the ones I’ve been reading don’t aspire to that kind of timeliness, but rather offer commentary on a range of reading material. If a book is not news, does that mean writing about it lacks relevance? It lacks urgency, I suppose, but surely not interest.
It’s also true that “bite-sized commentary” is common, but I’ve been reading a number of blogs that offer more of a mouthful–not in every post, perhaps, but often enough to make it seem unfair to dismiss all blogging as inevitably superficial. The literary posts on Amardeep Singh’s blog, for instance, can be quite extensive and detailed, as can those offered by The Reading Experience or The Little Professor.
Not coincidentally, I’ve used as my examples blogs maintained by writers who are are highly trained as professional readers and writers (two of them are English professors, one is a ‘reformed’ academic). While academic credentials are not the only things that can establish someone’s credibility as a literary critic, it’s hard to argue that the opinions of these three lack “authority,” even when offered in these less formal venues. Further, they set an example of thoughtful, historically-informed commentary that helps expose the inadequacy of the “anyone can say anything” culture of Amazon.Com reviewing and the many more slap-dash reading blogs. It’s hard not to see their efforts as complementary to those of the “professional writers” whose work Kirsh prefers.
And precisely because, as Kirsh says, “the whole point of a review is to set one mind against another, and see what sparks fly,” surely the bloggers who offer their expertise as generously as the three I’ve mentioned are doing us all a great service by putting their literary encounters out there for the rest of us to learn from and participate in.
Novel Readings 