Martin Amis on Other People

Then I read Other People, Martin Amis's weird Nabokovian misogynist metafictional mystery novel. It was supposed to be helpful because it's about a woman who loses her memory, and has to find out who she is. (Turns out she's the thrice-reincarnated Amy Hide, who's been murdered by the same detective twice—when the novel ends, she's just gone back to being a young teenager again. Unfortunately for anyone who wants to read it as a detective novel, there's no way to guess the metempsychosis plot ahead of time—those sorts of things aren't supposed to HAPPEN in realism.) The narration is mostly third person, a close third, who observes Mary Lamb (which is the name the amnesiac Amy gives herself) going around London and not quite knowing what she's doing. Then there are paragraphs of a first person narrator who talks just about Mary/Amy. The point is mostly to be mysterious, I think, but it's hard to get why it's necessary to play all these games in the first place—I don't CARE about Amy Hide, I don't find any of the characters appealing, and I don't really enjoy the jokes Amis wants to make about his characters, which seem to be that they're all insane deluded perverts. Ugh. It was a slightly awful novel.

Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, continued

The Memoirs are weird. Lucy Hutchinson, the Colonel's wife, writes them but she never identifies herself, and sometimes talks about herself in the third person. When she does this, she lets the reader know what "Mrs. Hutchinson" is thinking, even though she never calls herself as "I" or "me." For example, at one point, "My Lord of Portland and Mr. Howard came to Mrs. Hutchinson's lodgings...and my lord left her a message, that he must needs speak with her, upon a message of much concernment; whereupon she sought out my lord, knowing that he had professed much kindness and obligation to her husband, and thinking he might have some design not to acknowledge it by some real assistance" (279 of the Everyman ed., italics mine).

Also sometimes amusing are the details of how when Colonel Hutchinson was governor, he got his people to drink less by building more bars: "He procured unnecessary alehouses to be put down in all the towns, and if any one that he heard of suffered any disorder or debauchery in his house, he would not suffer him to brew any more. He was a little severe against drunkenness, for which the drunkards would sometimes rail at him; but so much were all the children of darkness convinced by his light, that they were more in awe of his virtue than his authority" (289-90).

There's good stuff in here, good enough to make me wish I were enjoying it more, but the way Hutchinson writes makes her prose very difficult to get through.

William Cowper's The Task

The Task was weird. I read it because I'd skimmed Kevis Goodman's chapter in Georgic Modernity and thought maybe the poem would be useful for thinking about personhood and individuality, which is something I've been interested in for a while. (Basically: are people just themselves, or can they be other people too? Where does one person stop and another one end? Does identity change if other things—money, nation, place—are pretty fungible?) I was especially interested in the part where the poem is sitting at home by the fire, talking about reading the news; that part seems like the poem wants to hide from the world and not talk to anyone, but I want to read it as the poem and its speaker being made part of a community through their remove from it. (I want The Task to be about blogging, more or less.) But now I think The Task is more interested in work, and kinds of silly work. It's called the TASK after all—and as the poem wears on, it gets more and more insistent about weaving that word into the end of lines. It likes to talk about various kinds of effort—moral effort, failed effort, frivolous effort, unrecognized efforts. (This is quite like Virgil's Georgics, too, which are at least vaguely about useful things.) Despite this puritanical impulse, The Task is still willing to make fun of itself, and so its biggest 'task' is the growing of tropical fruits and cucumbers in winter—it details how you have to pile up horse shit inside a glass house, have to make sure that the windows on the house are open sometimes to let out the heat because too much heat will kill the plants, have to refresh the poop sometimes or it'll get too cold, have to go around pollinating the flowers on the plants because of course there are no tropical insects to do it for you. And there's something sweet about the elaboration of all this detail: Cowper knows his project is sort of stupid, and dependent on shitty things (all those horrible passages about earthquakes and the apocalypse and how God is punishing England with effeminate fops and the prevalence of pubs), but he wants it to produce something lovely and rare and pleasure-giving as a crisp cucumber in the middle of February. It's kind of nice.

I just wish it weren't so damn long.

The Weirdness of the Georgics

Virgil is a crazy man. I have NO idea what The Georgics are about. Some of it (the last book) is ostensibly about beekeeping. At least, it has pictures of guys looking at swarms of bees in the air. But instead of spending the whole time talking about bees, Virgil suddenly decides, mid-book, that he wants to talk about some sick mythological bees and what they have to do with Orpheus' mother killing him and chopping his head off by accident. And then it's about Octavian at the end. Why is it about Octavian? I have no idea. This poem makes no sense.

Some of the other books are a little easier to handle. Book two, for example, is about trees, vines, grafting, and weaving willow twigs into various things. As a result of talking so much about about thick straight sappy growing things, the book is also fascinated with penises. The wheat, when it's ripe, seems to be a penis about to ejaculate. But the really weird thing is that trees are also vaginas. Here's how to graft branches from one tree to another, according to Virgil:

But various are the ways to change the state
Of Plants, to Bud, to Graff, t' Inoculate.
For, where the tender Rinds of Trees disclose
Their shooting Gems, a swelling Knot there grows.
Just in that space a narrow Slit we make ;
Then other Buds from bearing Trees we take ;
Inserted thus, the wounded Rind we close,
In whose moist Womb th' admitted Infant grows.
But, when the smoother Bole from Knots is free,
We make a deep Incision in the Tree.
And in the solid Wood the Slip inclose ;
The batt'ning bastard shoots again and grows ;
And in short space the laden Boughs arise,
With happy Fruit advancing to the Skies.
The Mother Plant admires the Leaves unknown
Of Alien Trees, and Apples not her own. (2:102-117)

It's like a sex change operation for a tree--just make a deep incision, stick the slip in, and suddenly the once-manly tree is now a girl tree. A pregnant girl, who doesn't even KNOW she's pregnant, because she never figures out that the apples aren't her own.

I mean, what the hell is that?

Why I'm Loving Independent People

From Chapter 21, 'Bearers'

The Fell King took the old man by the arm so that he should not fall, and whispered: "Gudny here wants to know whether it wouldn't be better to say the Lord's Prayer."

So the old man wept the Lord's Prayer, without ceasing to tremble, without lifting his head, without taking the handkerchief from his eyes. More than half the words were drowned in the heaving of his sobs; it was not so easy to make out what he said: "Our Father, which art in Heaven, yes, so infinitely far away that no one knows where You are, almost nowhere, give us this day just a few crumbs to eat in the name of Thy Glory, and forgive us if we can't pay the dealer and our creditors and let us not, above all, be tempted to be happy, for Thine is the Kingdom"—perhaps it was difficult to imagine a place equally well chosen for this engaging prayer; it was as if the Redeemer had written it for the occasion. They stood with bowed heads, all except Bjartur, who would never dream of bowing his head for an unrhymed prayer. Then they lifted the coffin out. They lifted it on to the horse and tied it across the saddle, then laid a hand on each end to steady it.

"Has the horse been spoken to?" asked the old man; and as it had not yet been done, he took an ear in each hand and whispered to it, according to ancient custom, for horses understand these things:

"You carry a coffin today. You carry a coffin today."

Then the funeral procession moved off.

The Fell King walked in the van, keeping as far as possible to the patches that were bare of snow, so that there would be less danger of mishap. Einar of Undirhlith led the horse, Olafur and Bjartur walked at each end of the coffin, and the old man limped along in the rear with his stick and the huge mittens with the flapping thumbs.

The women stood at the door with tear-swollen faces, watching the procession disappear in the whirling snow.

Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford

I finished listening to Cranford. It's short—sixteen inter-linked stories about a little village called 'Cranford,' composed mostly of spinsters and crazy widows. The narrator doesn't quite have a name, and not much of a backstory, but she watches everyone and describes everything they're up to with a lot of spirit and tenderness. This narrator is a brilliant way for Gaskell to tie all the observations together.

I'm not sure that it counts as a novel, but this might make it interesting to talk about with other not-quite-novels of earlier centuries. The nineteenth century feels like it has such a hegemony of REAL BIG, PROPER NOVELS, so it's interesting to see Cranford alongside those, and to wonder just how real that hegemony actually was.

George Eliot's Middlemarch

tried to log into this and couldn't remember the title. ninety five works? ninety two? ninety four? thank god for googleaccounts, anyway, or i'd have had to start a new blog.

finished reading middlemarch yesterday, or rather finished listening to librivox read it to me. the scandinavian man is my favorite; the se asian woman is a close second although most of her inflections are confusing; the rest of the readers are varying degrees of only-just-bearable.

we started middlemarch on the grand cross-country roadtrip, on our second day, i think. i'm glad to have taken the roadtrip, and to have read middlemarch—but i'm not sure i liked either that much while they were in process. it's especially hard to listen to the narrator talk about dorothea and casaubon and how dorothea feels trapped by her duty and admiration for her husband, while sitting in a little car for two-and-a-half weeks next to your favorite cousin from childhood for 5500 miles. i kept thinking: i love you, i want to get far away from you, please leave me at the next gas station. i thought that for most of the days after we crossed the mississippi—but at least, unlike dorothea, i didn't have to think this for a year and a half.

20 days aren't so bad, i guess.

the worst thing about middlemarch is how easy i found projecting myself on it. i worried not only that i was dorothea, but that i was casaubon (the nerdiness and rejection of real life in favor of scholarship), and mary garth (the rudeness) and caleb (the use of ridiculous words) and fred vincy (i bought an entire car, in CASH last month. only a fred would do that on my ridiculous stipend) and rosamond (because i tend to love men i've invented, and not the men they actually—although dorothea does this too), and i felt like lydgate every time i wanted to wring my cousin's neck while also wanting to take care of her. i suspect other people have this problem; i suspect every academic i've ever known who's read middlemarch has worried that he or she is casaubon, at least sometimes.

this identification works because george eliot is really good at social observation, which is why i'd wanted to read the novel in the first place. she points out all the horrible things about her characters, but points them out in a usually nice-enough-way that makes it possible to see yourself IN them, and not just try to distance yourself FROM them. (that is, she does that with the main characters. for the rustics who keep making trouble about the railroad at the end, she doesn't bother keeping them from meanness and ridicule. in general, poor people aren't people in middlemarch.)

probably there are other reasons it works, too. like paranoia. and reading too many novels, which tend to want you to make an example for yourself out of their narratives in the first place (or at least pre-modern novels do. i'm not sure ulysses wants you to do anything except stop making nasty comments about jews, and that's easy enough as a lesson.)

also: we know that only crazy people read fiction and say things like 'i'm john marcher.' but so i guess that means i'm crazy.