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.
