28 September 2009

Frances Burney's Evelina

I'm listening to Evelina on Librivox and it's making my really happy. The reader has a weird fake British accent which I don't understand (I don't understand why she's doing it, anyway—when she announces her name and the Librivox stuff at the beginning, she does it in a convincingly American accent), but other than that it's really fun. Evelina is kind of a total bitch—smart, critical, funny—but also scared and shy and making enough mistakes that her judgments don't strike me as bitchy so much as really, really fun. That is, Evelina doesn't know how out of place she is, which means that her criticisms aren't nearly as nasty as they really should register. And Burney's SO GOOD at putting in really appalling characters—Evelina's embarrassing French grandmother Mme Duval, Captain Mervin, Clement Willoughby are all terrible, terrible people who say ridiculous petty shit ALL THE TIME and behave badly and pick fights really appalling fights with each other. And then, the best part, Evelina's describing all this shit in letters to her guardian, who's even more socially clueless than she is (that is, more out of the loop of fashion—he's a much better judge of character than she is, but his letters haven't been in the narrative a while, so I tend to forget it), so it never feels as gossippy and bitchy as it properly is. Good job, Burney. She's created the perfect critical epistolary narrator without making her vulnerable to being called rude or impertinent.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Somewhere in here, I also finished re-reading Austerlitz. It's a novel that suggests stuff might have subjectivity—ghosts might exist, metal columns might talk to the (admittedly crazy) protagonist, lettuce might dream. Objects can do this because the content of their communications is all about the past. Nostalgia gives objects this subjectivity—think of the flavor and smell Proust's tea-dunked cookie jumping out of his tea cup and shaking him by the shoulders and shouting at him to remember his childhood at his aunt's house in Combray.

Austerlitz finds this personalization creepy, though, because it also suggests that people aren't people anymore. It talks a lot about Europe in the thirties, about Facism and anti-Semitism getting more and more popular, and about the terror of people who don't WANT their subjectivity anymore. (Lettuce might be people, but lettuce-people can't do much about evil Nazis who've voluntarily given up their personhood to go marching together through Nuremburg.)

And Austerlitz himself has very little agency. Mostly he does things because inanimate objects—radios, ghosts, memories—tell him to. In a way he's a medium, I guess, letting the past speak through him. (In another, he's a schizophrenic, who mistakenly believes in voices that aren't there—except the unnamed narrator seems to find his stories quite reasonable, and I did too.) There seems to be a larger complaint about how twentieth-century Europeans lost their personhood just as objects were getting new kinds of personhood (radios are a machine that TALK!!!) going on as well—and while the de-personalizing of humans seems to be a problem, the personalizing of objects might not be terrible. Sebald's not afraid of robots, anyway.

26 September 2009

Foucault and The Order of Things

Not really sure how to talk about this one. I think Foucault wasn't really sure how to talk about it either. He makes ideas into objects, I guess, and then arranges them in different ways, so that at one point there's an absolutely terrifying graph of lines and boxes and arrows pointing in different directions that indicates the shift from eighteenth-century ways of thinking about things to the nineteenth-century ways. The whole book hovers around three particular ideas that Foucault makes things: words, money and work, and life. They're things, in part, because eighteenth-century empiricism, which makes everything into things, reified them in various ways, so that Foucault can talk about how the eighteenth century made words into a class of things through the study of grammars; how political economy made labor an object that you can trade for any other object (food, sofa cushions, a new dress); and how botanical nomenclature (???) made life into words and stuff.

This is confusing, right? He also wants to talk about how those three things flow into each other, which he does in ways that are beautiful but also hard to follow.

I think this is all the brains I have to devote to thinking about Foucault right now. I finished reading him more than a week ago, so this is pretty sketchy.

20 September 2009

What War and Peace is About

Tolstoy's problem is: how do you write about something really, really big and complex? How do you describe and explain the Napoleonic Wars, for heaven's sake? His solution seems to be to say that there's not really a good way to do it, that you have to look at big history and individual lives and figures and shit with a weird kind of double- or triple-vision so that you're always blinking to shift the emphasis from one way of looking at it to another. (At the end of the novel, in the boring 42-page second epilogue where he considers what this has to do with choice and fate and comes out as pretty skeptical about individual freedom, he writes, "In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious," 1351.) The way that individuals are indebted for their conduct to much larger world-historical events means that both sides of the war, French and Russian, are both equally HUMAN.

So here's how that philosophizing works out in the dramatizing of actual events in the narrative. It's the last major battle of the war. The Russian troops haven't taken Napoleon prisoner, but they've done everything but, and it's time for things to be over. The old Russian field marshal Kutuzov gives a speech to the men at night in the ice. Afterward,
Kutuzov's words were hardly understood by the troops. No one could have repeated the field marshal's address, begun solemnly and then changing into an old man's simplehearted talk; but the hearty sincerity of that speech, the feeling of majestic triumph combined with pity for the foe and consciousness of the justice of our cause, exactly expressed by the old man's good-natured expletives, was not merely understood but lay in the soul of every soldier and found expression in their joyous and long-sustained shouts. Afterwards when one of the generals addressed Kutuzov asking whether he wished his caleche to be sent for, Kutuzov in answering unexpectedly gave a sob, being evidently greatly moved. (1210)
As it turns out, this ISN'T a great passage to illustrate what I'm talking about. But it's what I underlined and circled and wrote "this passage matters a lot" next to when I was at Panera this afternoon. So.

18 September 2009

War and Peace—Pierre's still alive, although Andre died

I went to Lemongrass and bought myself lunch ("Table for one?" the waitress asked me—I was so grateful to her for not saying "just one," or "only one" or "all by yourself?") and sat and ate it while reading War and Peace. Pierre's in POW camp somewhere outside Moscow, except before he was there he'd been arrested for being an arsonist (although he isn't—he was just in the fire because he was rescuing a little girl, because Tolstoy is a goddamn sentimentalist). And he was being troublesome, wouldn't give his name, and the French soldiers in charge of him wanted to teach him a lesson, so they put him with these five other guys who were executed by firing squad for being arsonists (is this a joke that's available in Russian—fired on for starting fires?), and Pierre's supposed to be the last, and so he has to watch the five other guys being blindfolded and bound and shot and shoved into the pit in the kitchen garden of the estate that the French have occupied. It's absolutely horrifying. The fifth prisoner is a young guy—the narrator keeps emphasizing that he's only about 18, and a factory worker, and skinny—and the novel shows in excruciating detail how he adjusts the cords on his blindfold because it's too tight around the back of his head; how he shifts against the post where they've bound him to be shot at. The point is that he's still painfully human and ordinary, just a guy wanting to be a bit more comfortable a couple seconds before he's shot to death—and then the narrator tells you that the French soldiers running the firing squad are just as human as the prisoner. And because Pierre's the one watching it, Pierre with his stupid boring love of the Masons and the Emperor and second-rate crappy mysticism, you get this overwhelming sense of how horrible it is to watch one group of people kill another person because that's what they're supposed to do. How horrible it is that that's what they're doing. Pierre's waiting to be executed himself (the narrator tells you that Pierre doesn't know he's actually being let off—that he's just here to be frightened into behaving) and he thinks of how it's not a PERSON executing him, but this IMpersonal "system" that wants him dead. Except that the system doesn't know he's a specific person (because the system itself isn't interested in personhood), so it's not even that specific—he's just sort of being eliminated. It's a very, very nineteenth-century machine-phobic scene (the eighteenth-century LIKES machines and impersonal things; the nineteenth starts to think that machines hate humans), but it's also incredibly affecting. I was weeping into my curry, and I felt ridiculous, but I couldn't stop. Anyway, I'm glad Pierre is still alive. Now that he's in POW camp, he lives with a nice peasant who makes shoes and shirts and tells stories, and Pierre has lost a lot of weight (the narrator thinks this is good, because it's trying to get him married off to Natasha in a couple chapters, although Pierre doesn't know that yet), and given up his stupid love of the stupid Masons who were annoying to begin with, AND mysteriously he's not clinically depressed anymore. (Being almost executed as a form of therapy—this novel is extremely odd.) But he seems like he's doing better now. It's good to see.

16 September 2009

Horrible Bodies in War and Peace

I spent a lot of time today hiding out in Para and Bowers and wherever, reading War and Peace. Prince Andre is dying, and Natasha is taking care of him in some hut on an estate they've all retreated to outside Moscow; Andre shouldn't be there at all, and it was only an accident that he ended up at Natasha's family's place, but he thinks it makes perfect sense because he's hallucinating with fever from the gangrene that's killing him, and Natasha keeps nursing him out of guilt and because he says he loves her, even though he smells terrible because his body is rotting. The last book's been full of disgusting horrible things—after Kuragin's amputation and the bullet being taken out of Andre's leg, then a young rabble-rouser Vereschagin who was arrested in Moscow for some kind of political crime is ripped to pieces by a mob on Rostopshchin's orders; this also is gross. And a little girl is almost burned to death and rescued by Pierre, who picks her up and carries her away but she's so freaked out she tries to pull out his hair and keeps biting his face, and he has to force himself not to throw her to the ground. People keep being horrified by other people's bodies; Helene, Pierre's wife, also kills herself, perhaps by accident, with some kind of medicine that's supposed to get her to abort the baby she's carrying at the moment and needs not to be; this also is gross. Also Moscow is on fire, and until recently in the novel, Moscow was a big sleeping woman's body, and sometimes it's also Napoleon's mother. Horrible shit keeps happening to bodies, which I suppose is what a war is about—and the way the extreme description of physical horror evokes the emotional horror that it's really about.

06 September 2009

Rousseau's Julie: Or the New Eloise

I'm reading William Kenrick's 1761 (first) English translation, on ECCO. (Kenrick decides to cal the novel Eloisa, instead of Julie; I'll be referring to the translation by Kenrick's title.) Kenrick's pretty wacky, and the novel itself is great too. It's also fun to read things that are clearly referenced by other things, and so now I can pick out the fact that Horace Walpole must have been a fairly big fan of Eloisa. The footprints of a scene like this one are all over The Castle of Otranto:
On this [suggestion that Eloisa marry the poorer Saint-Preux) your father expressed himself in a violent passion: he treated the proposal as absurd and ridiculous. How! my lord! said he, is it possible a man of honour, as you are, can entertain such a thought, that the last surviving branch of an illustrious family should to to lose and degrade its name, in that of nobody knows who; a fellow without home, and reduced to subsist upon charity. Hold, sir, interrupted my lord, you are speaking of my friend; consider that I must take upon myself every injury done him in my company, and that such language as is injurious to a man of honour, is more so to him who makes use of it... (v.1 216-217)

Fielding's Shamela

Problem is, I'm still not sure what I mean about Richardson's people seeming like robots. But I'm glad that in Shamela, she fakes drowning herself in order to cover up the fact that she disappeared for a couple hours to fuck Parson Williams—by giving Shamela a surface story and an inner real story, Fielding makes her seem so REAL to me. (Richardson's Pamela doesn't get to do that—she always means exactly what she says, and she's so so so BORING.)

James's What Maisie Knew

Starts with the problem of child custody. Maisie's parents have divorced, and some idiot judge decides that Maisie and her loyalties will be shared between them: she'll stay in one house for six months, and the other for the other six. Mom and Dad each remarry—Dad to Miss Overmore, Mom to Sir Claude—and because they lose interest in fighting with each other over Maisie (their second marriages aren't very happy either), they also lose interest in Maisie.
Maisie's step-parents like her a lot, though, and fall in love with each other so they can fight over her too. The whole novel is excessively, over-determinedly parallel—Maisie and her stepfather discover Mom and her new lover in the park; then Maisie and her stepmother discover Dad and his new lover at the lecture hall. Meanwhile, Maisie herself loves the people who are kind to her and wants to believe her parents are both good, so she's disappointed a lot. In turn, she disappoints her governess Mrs. Wix, who at the end of the novel is requesting that Maisie and she and Sir Claude all run away together and keep adjoining houses in some English country village. Maisie says no because she'd rather take Sir Claude's moral-responsibility-free option (which is...what? I seem to have forgotten), and Mrs. Wix leaves wondering just what Maisie knew—whether she's just as blind and amoral and selfish as her parents and their spouses have been, I guess. Mrs. Wix seems to think so.
The problem is that it's hard to tell how OLD Maisie is—whether she doesn't know things because, as Mrs. Wix says, she has no moral sense, or whether it's just because she's too young still to understand how shitty she's being to Mrs. Wix. Mrs. Wix is the only person who can do a good job at loving Maisie, and Maisie gives her up. This is sad, but what is the sad for? I always feel this about reading James: that he just likes to see his characters be miserable. He makes them make themselves suffer so much. I wish he'd be nicer to them.