Novel Readings

More clutter to clear out of my head, if I can — something that has been on my mind for about three weeks now, but in an unfocused or inconclusive form. In fact, I’ve started and then deleted a couple of posts about this already; I just couldn’t seem to get very far before either deciding I didn’t want to get into it after all or running out of energy. But now the topic feels like mental debris, so let’s see if I can make any kind of sense of it so I can move on. One thing my blog is supposed to be for is freeing me to write about things without having to be absolutely certain about them, after all.

Basically, I recently attended an interesting presentation on (among other things) a site that makes a range of teaching tools available for people in “my” field, Victorian studies. (I put the possessive pronoun in scare-quotes because something else I’ve been puzzling over is whether I still identify with, much less operate within, that scholarly field, or any scholarly field–a subject for another unfocused inconclusive post down the road, perhaps. Consider yourself warned.) The tools looked fine! Cool, even! It is clear that people are using them in interesting and no doubt valuable ways to engage their students and further the goals they have for their courses. Still, I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to use them myself–not because (and this is about the point in the post where I gave up the last two times, because I felt uneasy about potentially being misunderstood on this point!) I have any objections to them on their own terms, but because they seem peripheral to the main objectives I have for my own classes, especially (though not exclusively) my 19th-century fiction classes. Just to clarify the kinds of things I am talking about, one of the tools enables you to construct a timeline; others produce maps or annotations or digital scholarly editions.

This is all good! That is, it is all good if these are the activities you want your students engaged in–and I genuinely have no problem with that. I’m just not interested in doing that kind of thing myself, and what I was trying to figure out is why, and then whether this signals a deficiency of some kind in my own pedagogical approach. After some reflection, I decided the answer to the first part of that question is that increasingly, I do not approach my classes as steps towards making students into scholars, as part of a program designed to train them to do academic things. Instead, I aim to engage and train them as readers–attentive, well-informed, rigorous readers, to be sure, but with their eyes first and foremost on the page, not on contexts or scholarly apparatus or digital tools.

Another reason this post fell apart before is that I could see then, as I still can, that the distinction I just proposed between readers and scholars is reductive and perhaps unproductively polarizing. Still, I think there’s something to it, something that holds true even if you object to explaining it quite the way I have so far. After all, the vast majority of the students I teach at every level (now, really, including graduate students) are not going to enter the academy as professional literary scholars–but they are (I very much hope!) going to keep reading. My goal is to foster both the skills and the commitment they need to carry on reading as well (as intently, curiously, and critically) as we ask them to in our classes. It also matters to me that the literary works I feel most passionate about teaching are themselves oriented very much towards the world we live in and the relationship we have with it and with each other. Their ‘aboutness’ is moral, social, political; they have designs on us, dear readers,  and it takes all the time and energy we have to figure them out and see what stories we have to tell about them in our turn…and that’s not even taking into account just how long it takes to actually read the books with patience and attention.

I’m not saying that the kinds of hands-on learning students get from constructing timelines (or whatever) can’t contribute to the conversations I prioritize, and clearly it can also give them valuable experience of other kinds, including building the skills set required to work with these kinds of digital tools. I can’t shake the feeling, though, that these projects take time away from, or redirect attention from, the books themselves, and there are so few contexts in which a sustained focus on reading is even possible, much less required and supported. If my own work and interests were in the field of book history, I expect I would find these tools more personally congenial. At the same time, my own estimation of the value of some forms of scholarly work has also eroded so much in the past decade or so–my own impatience with its insularity, with the feeling of playing insider baseball, has gotten so acute– that I have far less interest in drawing students into that world than I have in … well, in doing what I do in my own classes, which is pretty well documented here across the decade-plus history of posts in this series.

It’s not that I never incorporate research into my class assignments: at the upper level in particular, and of course in graduate seminars, there is always a scholarly dimension, and I do my best (albeit with mixed success) to make it relevant and valuable, not just perfunctory. And in spite of my alienation from aspects of academia (also something recorded and interrogated regularly over the dozen years I’ve written this blog) it’s not that I see no value in specialized literary research and scholarship: I have done it myself, and my teaching is suffused with insights and strategies and knowledge gleaned from my three decades as first a student and then a teacher in the academy. I routinely bring contextual information to the classroom; I have brought maps and timelines sometimes too–they are invaluable aids when teaching Waverley! I have also done some digital assignments, including wiki building–though I am much less inclined to go to that kind of logistical trouble now. So maybe I’m fretting about something that is really a difference of pedagogical degree, not kind, or maybe I’m just going through pointless mental convolutions because I felt uncomfortable during that presentation due to the gap between the student experience it championed and the one I (think I) offer and as a result I wanted (as we are all prone to, I suppose, when we feel sidelined or irrelevant) to make up some story to justify myself!

I’m still having second thoughts about this whole post: I wonder why this topic in particular is making me so self-conscious. But I don’t want to lose my nerve about thinking out loud in public, and of course one possible value of writing this up is in hearing what, if anything, other people think about the things I’ve been turning around in my head. I don’t mean to set reading and scholarship, or reading and research, against each other in any absolute way, but it has been hard for me to put the difference I’ve been thinking about in any other way. I’d like to think that my teaching award answers the second part of my earlier question–I am not shortchanging my students — but that doesn’t mean I’m not still learning all the time myself.

I was looking back over some old posts in this series and November entries have a certain … similarity, shall we say! We’re all–students and faculty alike–tired, busy, and kind of gloomy. The introduction of a week-long break (coming next week for us) has not made as much difference as you might think: last year I was struck by how much more tired and behind a lot of my students seemed when classes started up again, and because the break also comes quite late in the month, we all felt a bit frantic after it because the end of classes was suddenly so close.

Right now, though, a week off from the regular routine of classes seems like something to look forward to. I’ll have plenty to do! I’ve got midterms, papers, and paper proposals coming in this week that I’d like to turn around as soon as possible, and that will be a lot easier without also doing class prep. I’m also a reader for a Ph.D. student who is defending her dissertation next Friday: rereading her thesis and working up questions for the defense will be a big (though rewarding) job. And just to make sure I’m making the absolute most of the week’s more flexible schedule, I’ve got a dentist appointment, a medical appointment, and a hair cut also scheduled!

We aren’t quite there yet, however: there’s still the rest of this week to get through. In Mystery and Detective Fiction we’ve just wrapped up our discussions of Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses. Although I think Knots and Crosses is gripping and clever, I’ve been wishing that I left The Terrorists in instead when I decided which book to cut to make room for An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, because its political engagement is in some ways more immediately relevant and its morality is more complicated. That said, Knots and Crosses offers a pretty direct engagement with what we now call “toxic masculinity.” Its Gothic games seemed a bit too pat to me this time, though–I don’t entirely disagree with Rankin’s own assessment of it as a bit too clever, a bit too much the self-conscious work of a young writer immersed in literary theory and history and eager to show off what he knew.

In 19th-Century Fiction tomorrow we are finishing our time on Silas Marner. Because I have only taught Silas Marner once or twice before, and many years ago, I have been feeling my way a bit hesitantly, not being entirely certain which questions will catch students’ interests or draw them most naturally towards the novel’s big ideas or best moments. Oddly, perhaps, I’ve found it difficult precisely because the novel is so short, though I chose it hoping that its brevity would make George Eliot more accessible than usual. I dialed back the amount of context I provided at the outset, but even so it took up nearly one whole class, and that left us only three more to talk more freely about the novel. With Middlemarch, in contrast, I typically have at least three weeks’ worth of classes, or around nine hours, and we get even more time when I assign it in Close Reading. And yet three hours is actually plenty in some ways too: because not a great deal happens in Silas Marner just in terms of plot, I feel as if I have been struggling to work on the meaning of what does go on without repeating myself. Still, I think it has been OK overall. In fact, I have been pleased at both the quantity and the quality of participation in class discussion, which certainly suggests to me that they are finding the novel’s distinct combination of realism and moral fable engaging. We have already talked a fair amount about the importance of taking responsibility and making deliberate choices, rather than trusting to luck, fate, or God, as key to Eliot’s moral vision; tomorrow we will talk about this in the specific context of family, especially parenting, including both Silas’s choice to raise Eppie (in contrast to Godfrey’s actions) and Eppie’s choice to stay with Silas. I think this is the only one of Eliot’s novels that comes close to being unironically sentimental, at least in the main plot line–and it’s just so lovely.

The three Cs are are Cold, Collins, and Chandler, and I am actually done with all of them now, but I haven’t blogged about my classes since they were all just starting up, so I thought it was time to get caught up. A trace of the first does remain in the form of a minor but lingering cough, but although I did end up having to cancel one day of lectures when I actually lost my voice for a bit, it wasn’t too bad. A number of my students and colleagues have been much sicker, poor things.

I wasn’t really sorry to wrap up our class time on either Chandler or Collins. My patience with both Philip Marlowe and his author was more limited than usual: all those slick similes are really no compensation for the misogyny and homophobia. I think I need to give In a Lonely Place a closer look to see if it would be a more palatable option for my sample of noir fiction. Or perhaps someone would like to recommend a Hammett or Chandler novel (or another hard-boiled writer altogether) that they particularly admire for me to try out? Because I really don’t enjoy this genre enough to want to read widely in it before making a new selection.

I also felt just a bit impatient with The Woman in White, though it is a lot more fun than The Big Sleep. At one point in our discussions this time a student actually asked a question I ask sometimes too about different novels, that could perhaps be summed up as “Are we giving this novel too much credit?” — or “Are we putting more interpretive weight on this novel’s details than they can really bear?” I feel that more with Lady Audley’s Secret (which I think is fundamentally incoherent, or indecisive, about some of its central thematic questions) than I do with The Woman in White, but I think it’s always a fair question to ask. It’s not one that I think can ever be answered definitively either way, but there’s no doubt that some novels seem less in control of their own meaning than others, while some can rather deflate under scrutiny. Some novels, too (as I ended up saying about The Woman in White, though not, if I remember correctly, to the same student) raise a lot of interesting questions or stir the pot in thought-provoking ways without necessarily resolving every aspect.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction we moved on to P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, which is one of my own personal favorites, partly because the confrontation it builds up to between Cordelia and Sir Ronald is about important ideas as much as about solving a crime. We had our last class on that Monday, and today we started Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses–and after that we have only two more novels and the term is done! It still feels as if we only just got started.

In 19th-Century Fiction we are actually on our penultimate novel, Silas Marner. I’ve been a bit nervous about how it would go, as it starts out pretty slowly and Eliot’s prose requires closer attention than any of our other novelists’. I also haven’t taught it very often–only twice before that I can remember, and never in a lecture class of this sort. Today was “big picture” day so I set up some key ideas and then we began talking about Silas himself, first as he is seen by his neighbors in Raveloe and then as we come to understand him thanks to the narrator’s explanations and commentary. I tried to emphasize the importance of noticing the different ways people arrive at their explanations for what they see, which I think is key not just to the themes of the novel but also to its pacing, in which not much often seems to be happening but we realize, if we know to look for it, that a lot of the action is in perception and interpretation. One student brought up Silas’s beloved pot, which I thought was a particularly nice detail to have picked up on:

Yet even in this stage of withering a little incident happened, which showed that the sap of affection was not all gone. It was one of his daily tasks to fetch his water from a well a couple of fields off, and for this purpose, ever since he came to Raveloe, he had had a brown earthenware pot, which he held as his most precious utensil among the very few conveniences he had granted himself. It had been his companion for twelve years, always standing on the same spot, always lending its handle to him in the early morning, so that its form had an expression for him of willing helpfulness, and the impress of its handle on his palm gave a satisfaction mingled with that of having the fresh clear water. One day as he was returning from the well, he stumbled against the step of the stile, and his brown pot, falling with force against the stones that overarched the ditch below him, was broken in three pieces. Silas picked up the pieces and carried them home with grief in his heart. The brown pot could never be of use to him any more, but he stuck the bits together and propped the ruin in its old place for a memorial.

It’s a strangely touching incident that got me thinking again about “Mrs Tulliver’s Teraphim” in The Mill on the Floss. We all need at least something to love, and the reasons we cherish something in particular are often bound up in our most inarticulate yearnings.

So that’s where we are! Snuffles aside, it hasn’t really been a bad term so far, as both courses are pretty familiar. I’ve been able to do some reading of my own, most recently Lincoln in the Bardo, and I just sent off a review of Claire Harman’s Murder By the Book, which was a pretty fun assignment. I’ll be consistently busy between now and the end of term, but not overwhelmingly so, and as I’m on sabbatical next term, I will be able to take a genuine break over the holidays.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction we’ve just wrapped up our discussion of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It’s been an interesting fall to be teaching this course. I always open it with some discussion of the differences between “literary” and genre fiction–not just what those differences are presumed to be but how they shape people’s expectations and evaluations of books on either side of the supposed divide. I imagine, however, that to students already accustomed to a literature curriculum that incorporates not just popular culture but a wide range of media (we have courses on both Chaucer and comics, on Shakespeare as well as Tolkien, on poetry and on television and video games) it sometimes seems as if in advocating for the intellectual gravitas of our course material I am arguing against a straw man.

This term, however, both Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail and Luke Brown in the TLS stepped up to show my students in real time that the debates about the literary merits of crime fiction are ongoing and can be both intense and judgmental. Wente published an op-ed decrying the degradation of our curriculum–yes, ours in particular: she singled out Dalhousie’s English department and Mystery & Detective Fiction was among the courses she specifically mentioned as symptoms of our decline. (I won’t link to Wente’s column, because I don’t want her bad faith and shoddy practices rewarded with clicks, but here’s a link to a tweet showing the letter I wrote to the editors in response to it.)  Brown, in his turn, wrote a rather grudging review of Belinda Bauer’s Snap, which was (regrettably, in his opinion) long-listed for the Booker Prize. Not satisfied with explaining why he didn’t think highly of Snap in particular, Brown drew broader conclusions about mysteries as a necessarily lesser form of fiction. As part of my commentary on Christie, I also quoted Peter Keating’s 2018 book Agatha Christie and Shrewd Miss Marple (which I reviewed myself for the TLS), in which he observes tartly at the outset that Christie is “hugely read, greatly loved, widely admired, and critically ignored” — a situation his own book, of course, sets out to correct.

I bring these “show and tell” materials into class because I think it is valuable for students to see that our work has resonance and relevance outside the classroom. These are debates that are actually going on “out there”–though not always, as Wente’s column exemplifies, to a very high standard. She is not well-informed, but they will be, and I hope this helps them see that there is both a place and a need outside the university for what they are learning–not so much the assigned content of the course as the nature of the conversation we’re having about it.

In 19th-Century Fiction we’ve just finished our work on The Warden. I’ve written a couple of times already about why Trollope feels unexpectedly pertinent to our current moment, whether as a respite from or a tacit commentary on its crises. Working on The Warden during Brett Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS hearings was … well, disorienting. Could there be a sharper contrast between meek Mr. Harding–who, faced for the first time with a challenge to the privilege he has so enjoyed (and, by some lights, done such amiable good with), resigns rather than live at odds with his now-provoked conscience–and Kavanaugh, who ranted and raved in outrage at the very idea that he should be investigated thoroughly, never mind held accountable, for any past misconduct? When John Bold rather sheepishly tells Mr. Harding that he is launching a legal inquiry that may prove damaging, the Warden replies, “if you act justly, say nothing in this matter but the truth, and use no unfair weapons in carrying out your purposes, I shall have nothing to forgive.” Then, even after he is assured that Bold’s complaint will fail and there is no legal or regulatory reason for him to give up his contested position, Mr. Harding is not satisfied, because “he was not so anxious to prove himself right, as to be so.”

The Warden is an odd little book, and in many respects it is hardly a radical one. As we discussed in class, for instance, the bedesman who speak up for what they think is theirs by right are characterized as greedy and ungrateful, and they are ultimately punished for it, ending up worse off both economically and emotionally than they were under Mr. Harding’s wardenship. The novel’s social vision is fundamentally paternalistic. There is something at least potentially radical, though, about its ethical vision–about its casting as a modern-day hero someone who, when criticized, does not lash out but turns inward, and who then will not be dissuaded even by the most powerful people around him into ignoring what his conscience decides is right. Mr. Harding’s resignation does not really fix anything: the novel explores at several levels the complicated relationship between individuals and larger systems and institutions, and in doing so it raises timely questions about the possibility of meaningful moral agency in corrupt circumstances. I think a lot of us are struggling with this right now: the things we can do on our own seem so insufficient that it is tempting to stop trying to do anything. There’s some encouragement to us in the vicarious satisfaction we get from seeing the Warden persist. Even Archdeacon Grantly, imposing bully that he is, is ultimately no match for him! We all probably face a version of the Archdeacon’s exasperated “Good heavens!” sometimes, maybe especially when we try to take some small, imperfect, corrective action of our own. The Warden is not about taking to the barricades–but most of us aren’t going to do that anyway. Mr. Harding might at least inspire us to play our imaginary cellos with renewed vigor as we carry on living our own ethically complicated lives as best we can.