30 November 2009

Paul Hunter, Before Novels

Before Novels is making me ANGRY. It's early in the morning, I've been doing way too much reading lately and too little talking to people, and so I've decided that I Hate New Historicism And Everything It Stands For. And I really like ahistoricist formalism, except that I sort of hate everyone who does it. So.

On the other hand, John Dunton sounds like a delightful man, and I hope to get to read some of him next spring.

28 November 2009

Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance

She may be dull, but she knows what she's talking about:

Hortensius. I rejoice that you do not defend Circulating libraries,—if yon [sp] had, I would have fought against them with more success, than I have met with hitherto, when I have been your opponent.
Euphrasia. I am entirely of your opinion, they are one source of the vices and follies of our present times; and we shall have occasion to say more of them when we come to draw inferences from the effects of novel-reading upon the manners.
Hort. They have been well ridiculed in Mr. Colman's farce called Polly Honeycombe.
Euph. In some respects, but the Satire would have been much stronger and the moral more commendable, if he had not exhibited the parents as objects of Ridicule; which spoils the effect, and puts it upon a footing with too many other Dramatic pieces upon the same plan.
Sophronia. I am delighted with your remark, and have often been offended with this dramatic error: it is so general that most of the plays seem calculated to teach our youth, that they are wiser than their parents, and that they may safely deceive and ridicule them.
Hort. You say true, there is hardly a play where one does not meet with these absolute children and undutiful parents, and the poets always take care to punish the latter, and reward the former.
Euph. This likewise is one of the evils of our times; but we will not enlarge upon it here, as it is foreign to our present subject.
Soph. I beg your pardon!—undutiful parents and arbitrary children are as frequently found in Novels as upon the Stage, and the remark is equally proper upon both kinds of writing.
Euph. I cannot deny it.—But I shall neither applaud, nor recommend any that have a tendency to weaken the respect due to parents; for upon that depends in a great measure, the education of youth, their introduction into life, and indeed all the social and domestic virtues.
Hort. It was I that led you into this useful observation:—I do not repent it, nor will I reckon the time as lost.
(from The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries, and Manners; with Remarks on the Good and Bad Effects of It, on them Respectively; in a Course of Evening Conversations. Vol. II, Evening IX, pp.7-11[9].)
Conflicts between parents and children—whose roles Sophronia cleverly switches—are totally the plot of all the 18th-c novels I've read so far. Her thesis that children were behaving badly because they'd read Richardson and Fielding needs a little re-consideration—LMWM notes that reading Clarissa (pub.1748) in the late 1750's painfully reminded her of her of her own courtship in the early 1710's—but when Reeve pins responsibility for children's bad behavior on the novel, she gives fiction a whole lot of social power, and this is interesting.

27 November 2009

26 November 2009

Samuel Pepys and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Personal prose is boring. I know that it's supposed to be boring, but it still bothers me. Pepys writes about very ordinary things, and he writes it all to himself but maybe with the hope that people would find it among all the papers he left to Magdalen, and read it again. So I read his 1666 diary, which is the one where London mostly recovers from the plague but then burns half down in September. In the midst of this, there's a lot of gossip and bitching—what rumor was circulating at court about Charles' favorite mistress's childhood masturbatory habits, how bad Sir William Penn's poop smelled in April, when he emptied his chamberpot while Sam and Elizabeth were hanging out on their roof next door and had to go in because of the smell, what the Queen's doctor said about the membranes of her aborted fetus's corpse (from the membranes, she was just as healthy as any other woman with a lot of babies). Elizabeth never had babies; Sam had a lot of mistresses, some of whom did have babies, although it's not clear whether the babies were his. (He would have written it in his diary, if he thought so.) He's worried about his testicles; Elizabeth is worried about her teeth. Their house doesn't burn down, but they lose some money. At the end of the year, though, they have more plate than they've ever had before.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did write for an audience—for her best friend and her husband and her sister and her daughter and her other friends, including Alexander Pope and women she'd grown up with and the man she fell in love with when she was fifty, and the exiled Jacobite who became her substitute child, along with his wife, for like a decade when they were all in Italy. She has the advantage over Pepys that she actually went places and saw stuff, too—made fun of the relics in a Catholic church in Austria, made fun of the preacher's hat at a Calvinist church in Holland, visited the late Sultan's favorite mistress outside Constantinople, flirted with lords in Venice, visited a lady's bath in Constantinople (if English ladies went around in public naked, she says, they'd make less fuss about faces—she'd had smallpox already at this point, and was a little sensitive about her face, I guess). When she got old, she retired to a country house she'd bought between Lake Iseo and Milan, where she read a lot of novels her daughter sent her. She liked Smollett, liked some H. Fielding, thought S. Fielding was stupid (the Fieldings were both her first cousins), and resented Richardson for being annoying and compelling at the same time. A lot of her letters are tedious as hell. They're interesting though for showing how she's a different subject for different audiences, which is something that very little of the epistolary fiction I've read has been interested in, I'm not sure why.

Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, excerpts from The Spectator

Then I read some of The Spectator, parts where they wrote about taste and imagination and making things up and why Chinese gardens are prettier than English ones (it's because English gardens are obviously fake, and so can't be imagined as much) and also on how Locke says that everything you see is just your brain making it up anyway because you don't really see with your eyes but with your brain. They do this after they spend four or five very boring essays writing about Paradise Lost, which they discuss in terms of character and passion and other things that were boring. In retrospect, though, the PL stuff is a good case-study for the taste/imagination stuff—because what they like about Milton is his tendency to make you see things that can't exist or were never there or are too big to be really contemplated by a single viewpoint. The point is that you're putting together the fall of the rebel angels and the war between Hell and Heaven and whatever only in your brain, and the poem's ability to make you do that is what makes it so special.
They seem to be boosting Paradise Lost because it's in English—it may not be better than The Aeneid, but it's more accessible. But more accessible to whom? In the taste and imagination stuff, they leave bits of Greek untranslated, as though their general readership should be able to figure that out. But in the Milton stuff, they mention "English readers" as readers of the English language exclusively, not as readers who happen to live in England. I didn't know that The Spectator was aiming at people who couldn't read Latin—and, by aiming at them, sort of tacitly admitting that it's okay that they can't. I wasn't expecting to find that from Mr. Spectator.

Erich Auerbach on Mimesis

Mimesis was big. Enormous. I've been reading it for far too long. It's about realism, whatever the fuck that is, and Auerbach wants to get at it in two ways—by talking about Jesus, and by talking about class. The religion and the Marxism are actually tied up together because Jesus permits realism by introducing poor people as important people. Unlike Euryclea in The Odyssey (well, really more like the maids), poor people in the New Testament of the Bible are a very real and necessary part of the action. And talking about poor people practically guarantees realism because poor people do stuff—their lives interact with objects and teem with events that are real and boring and very ordinary. (Rich people just fantasize about courtly romance; poor people poop. In Auerbach's reckoning, rich people never poop and poor people never have ridiculous fantasies.)
He's also a goddamned structuralist, and wants to talk about how sentences and verses and things are constructed, so that he can show you that the realism is there in the very grammar and meter of the things he's quoting. Eh—sort of, but why is it so important to demonstrate that even the conjunctions care about realism? That god-is-in-the-details kind of reading is starting to feel untrustworthily glib.

Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer

She Stoops to Conquer is about people who feel more like people than I was expecting to find on the late-eighteenth-century stage. It's a courtship plot and a practical joke, and it reads a lot more like Tom Jones or The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph or The Fool of Quality or even Clarissa than I was ready to deal with. (It's about a sloppy son, on one hand, and a daughter whose father doesn't like her fiance on the other.) None of it really needs to be on stage, except that it gets some mileage out of the daughter's changing her outfit to look like a barmaid. And the staging is available to make the mistake about the house/inn more concrete. But otherwise it could be a novel, which seems surprising. Have I read any novels that could be plays? I don't think so.

Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness

Has almost no plot. Has almost no people. It's a horror novel, of a kind—the point is to be really creeped out, at the end, and to understand that Conrad wants you to know that racism is the worst thing that there is in the whole wide world. Also some other stuff. Colonialism will kill you. Capitalism will make you a whore. Heterosexuality is probably bad, too. In fact, all kinds of desire are terrible and will only induce misery. There's a boat. There are some things about how humans might actually be like the most machine-like of animals (like viruses? like worms?), and all our attempts at civilization are a very silly attempt to cover that. Okay, fine. But what's the point of that kind of writing?

Lisa Zunshine on Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel

LZ says that we read novels so that we can exercise our facility at "theory of mind"—so that we can practice recognizing when other people are people, and how we can tell, and what we can do with that realization. It seems reasonable, at least about the novels that she picks to examine. A lot of them are stories about grotesque personages—Lovelace from Clarissa, Humbert from Lolita. I mean, can that really be the appeal of fiction about really boring, ordinary people? Does reading Raymond Carver really exercise my theory of mind?

25 November 2009

Trollope's Barchester Towers and Walter Scott's Waverley

Both are kind of stupid novels. Barchester Towers is about several clergymen and their families in an imaginary county that Trollope made up. The main problem of the novel is that their world might, possibly, change—there is a new Bishop, and the new Bishop brings with him a new guy, and the new guy has new ideas, and might marry various unmarried women in the families of the clergymen, and then an old guy shows up with his family whom everyone forgot about, and so they are new, and they have new and dangerous ideas (they've come from ITALY), and then the new guy gets in a fight with one of the old guys, so they send for another new guy—whose ideas are properly conservative, so it's okay—and the new new guy shows up, and of course he and the old new guy are both in love with the same woman, but finally the new new guy gets her, and all this is happy, and that's the end of the novel.

It's an incredibly frustrating thing to read. What's valuable about reading it? I'm not sure. I put it on my list after having bought it four or five years ago on the advice of Stephen Booth, who said he thought it was "funny." I suspect he found the backbiting clergy and the overbearing wives and browbeaten husbands funny, but I just kept wanting to hurl Barchester Towers across the room. Didn't, though. Finished it, but maybe I shouldn't have.

Waverley is called a novel, but it might not be one. It's about Edward Waverley, who is young and pretty (he looks good in a kilt, we learn) and likes to read fiction but knows little about the world. He goes to Scotland in 1745 as part of the pro-Hanoverian army, but he falls in love with the daughter of a highland chieftain who tells him she won't marry him because he's not a Jacobite. He quits the army and goes on a hunting expedition in which he is wounded, and taken back to the chieftain's house, but before he gets there the girl who's in love with him has him kidnapped—she's the daughter of a lowland Baron or something, and also a childhood friend of the chieftain's daughter—and sent off to Edinburgh, where he's presented to Charles Stuart, and of course he doesn't decline CS's offer that he join the Jacobite army. There's a battle. EW does nothing very interesting, except wince when his captain from his old English regiment is killed. He takes a prisoner, Captain Talbot, whom he releases when CT learns that his wife has lost the baby she was pregnant with and might die herself. EW then runs away, sort of by accident again—he doesn't decide to desert, but it just happens. (He never really decided to join the Jacobite army, either—other people made it happen.) He gets arrested, but is treated well, but then he's rescued by someone who thinks he's another Edward, and so he isn't charged with treason. He sees a newspaper that says his father in London is having to pay all sorts of bail because of EW's treason, so he takes a coach down. It takes three weeks, and he sits next to a very annoying woman who keeps wanting to pump him for stories, and he has to keep avoiding telling her that he's the famous traitor Edward Waverley, but otherwise nothing else happens. He sees CT, who tells him that his father, although dead, wasn't in any trouble at all. EW goes back to Edinburgh, because he's in love with the girl who had him kidnapped. He travels down and gets her father to consent to their marriage. Then he goes back to London. The highland chieftain's son is being tried for treason, and EW watches him hang. Then he goes back home, and his bride arrives and they're going to get married. Then they go see her father, who now lives in a cave. EW and CT get involved in some complicated real estate, and in the end CT buys EW's wife's father's home and says that father and EW and wife can all live there for the length of father's life, so they do.

So. Waverley doesn't do much, makes almost no decisions, and makes a muddle of everything. He's a failure, essentially—except that he sees interesting things, encounters exotic Scottish personages, and looks nice in a kilt. The plot of Waverley is also sort of stupid—every time something happens, it's an accident, which is disappointing in a novel that's supposed to be about heroism and wars and stuff. It's tempting to say that Scott is being satirical when he does this, but I don't think Scott is really that smart about his fiction.

14 November 2009

Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

From Chapter Six:

And then an event did occur, to Emily, of considerable importance. She suddenly realised who she was.
There is little reason that one can see why it should not have happened to her five years earlier, or even five later; and none, why it should have come that particular afternoon.
She had been playing houses in a nook right in the bows, behind the windlass (on which she had hung a devil's-claw as a door-knocker); and tiring of it was walking rather aimlessly aft, thinking vaguely about some bees and a fairy queen, when it suddenly flashed into her mind that she was she.
She stopped dead, and began looking over all of her person which came within the range of her eyes. She could not see much, except a fore-shortened view of the front of her frock, and her hands when she lifted them for inspection; but it was enough for her to form a rough idea of the little body she suddenly realised to be hers.
She began to laugh, rather mockingly. "Well!" she thought, in effect. "Fancy you, of all people, going and getting caught like this!—You can't get out of it now, not for a very long time: you'll have to go through with being a child, and growing up, and getting old, before you'll be quit of this mad prank!"
Determined to avoid any interruption of this highly important occasion, she began to climb the ratlines, on her way to her favourite perch at the masthead. Each time she moved an arm or a leg in this simple action, however, it struck her with fresh amazement to find them obeying her so readily. Memory told her, of course, that they had always done so before: but before, she had never realized how surprising this was.
Once settled on her perch, she began examining the skin of her hands with the utmost care: for it was hers. She slipped a shoulder out of the top of her frock; and having peeped in to make sure she really was continuous under her clothes, she shrugged it up to touch her cheek. The contact of her face and the warm bare hollow of her shoulder gave her a comfortable thrill, as if it was the caress of some kind friend. But whether the feeling came to her through her cheek or her shoulder, which was the caresser and which the caressed, that no analysis could tell her.
Once fully convinced of this astonishing fact, that she was not Emily Bas-Thornton (why she inserted the "now" she did not know, for she certainly imagined no transmigrational nonsense of having been anyone else before), she began seriously to reckon its implications.
First, what agency had so ordered it that out of all the people in the world who she might have been, she was this particular one, this Emily; born in such-and-such a year out of all the years in Time, and encased in this particular rather pleasing little casket of flesh? Had she chosen herself, or had God done it?
At this, another consideration: who was God? She had heard a terrible lot about HIm, always: but the question of His identity had been left vague, as much taken for granted as her own. Wasn't she perhaps God, herself? Was it that she was trying to remember? However, the more she tried, the more it eluded her. (How absurd, to disremember such an important point as whether one was God or not!) So she let it slide: perhaps it would come back to her later.
Secondly, why had all this not occurred to her before? She had been alive for over ten years, now, and it had never once entered her head. She felt like a man who suddenly remembers at eleven o'clock at night, sitting in his own arm-chair, that he had accepted an invitation to go out to dinner that night. There is no reason for him to remember it now: but there seems equally little why he should not have remembered it in time to keep his engagement. How could he have sat there all the evening, without being disturbed by the slightest misgiving? How could Emily have gone on being Emily for ten years, without once noticing this apparently obvious fact?
It must not be supposed that she argued it all out in this ordered, but rather longwinded fashion. Each consideration came to her in a momentary flash, quite innocent of words; and in between her mind lazed along, either thinking of nothing or returning to her bees and the fairy queen. If one added up the total of her periods of conscious thought, it would probably reach something between four and five seconds; nearer five, perhaps; but it was spread out over the best part of an hour.
Well then, granted she was Emily, what were the consequences, besides enclosure in that particular little body (which now began on its own account to be aware of a sort of unlocated itch, most probably somewhere on the right thigh), and lodgement behind a particular pair of eyes?
It implied a whole series of circumstances. In the first place, there was her family, a number of brothers and sisters from whom, before, she had never entirely dissociated herself; but now she got such a sudden feeling of being a discrete person that they seemed as separate from her as the ship itself. However, willy-nilly she was almost as tied to them as she was to her body. And then there was this voyage, this ship, this mast round which she had would her legs. She began to examine it with almost as vivid an illumination as she had studied the skin of her hands. And when she came down from the mast, what would she find at the bottom? There would be Jonsen, and Otto, and the crew: the whole fabric of a daily life which up to now she had accepted as it came, but which now seemed vaguely disquieting. What was going to happen? Were there diseases running loose, disasters which her rash marriage to the body of Emily Thornton made her vulnerable to?
A sudden terror struck her: did anyone know? (Know, I mean, that she was someone in particular, Emily—perhaps even God—not just any little girl.) She could not tell why, but the idea terrified her. It would be bad enough if they should discover she was a particular person—but if they should discover she was God! At all costs she must hide that from them.—But suppose they knew already, had simply been hiding it from her (as guardians might from an infant king)? In that case, as in the other, the only thing to do was to continue to behave as if she did not know, and so outwit them.
But if she was God, why not turn all the sailors into white mice, or strike Margaret blind, or cure somebody, or do some other Godlike act of the kind? Why should she hide it? She never really asked herself why: but instinct prompted her strongly of the necessity. Of course, there was the element of doubt (suppose she had made a mistake, and the miracle missed fire): but more largely it was the feeling that she would be able to deal with the situation so much better when she was a little older. Once she had declared herself there would be no turning back; it was much better to keep her godhead up her sleeve, for the present.
Grown-ups embark on a life of deception with considerable misgiving, and generally fail. But not so children. A child can hide the most appalling secret without the least effort, and is practically secure against detection. Parents, finding that they see through their children in so many places the child does not know of, seldom realise that, if there is some point the child really gives his mind to hiding, their chances are nil.
So Emily had no misgivings when she determined to preserve her secret, and needed have none.
Down below on the deck the smaller children were repeatedly crowding themselves into a huge coil of rope, feigning sleep and then suddenly leaping out with yelps of panic and dancing round it in consternation and dismay. Emily watched them with that impersonal attention one gives to a kaleidoscope. Presently Harry spied her, and gave a hail.
"Emilee-ee! Come down and play House-on-fire!"
At that, her normal interests momentarily revived. Her stomach as it were leaped within her sympathetically toward the game. But it died in her as suddenly: and not only died, but she did not even feel disposed to waste her noble voice on them. She continued to stare without making any reply whatever.
"Come on!" shouted Edward.
"Come and play!" shouted Laura. "Don't be a pig!"
Then in the ensuing stillness Rachel's voice floated up:
"Don't call her, Laura, we don't really want her."

10 November 2009

Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self

Here's a quote that seems to me to be entirely RIGHT:
The action of Fanny Burney's vast collections of journals and letters, like that of most women's writing in her century, derives from her attempt to defend—not to discover, define, or assert—the self. Both her choices and her ways of describing them testify to her productive and self-protective solution to unescapable problems of women's existence. That solution provides psychic space for her imaginative life, thus making her literary career possible, and also shapes the operations of her imagination.
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976. 160).
And it works so well for other kinds of fictionalized women's writing in the 18th century: Pamela as an attempt to defend the self; Evelina, certainly. The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph isn't about threat and defense, though, so much as avoidance of potential misfortune, and then the failure of that avoidance and bad things happening. So I'm saying there's a difference between SAVING YOURSELF from something and TRYING TO KEEP SOMETHING BAD FROM HAPPENING to you. I think.

09 November 2009

Virginia Woolf, Flush

Read this a while ago, but I've been thinking about it. Could connect it to Don Quixote because there's a wonderful parody of a courtship plot--Flush's emotional investment in Miss Barrett, his desire to protect her, and then his conflict over this with Mr. Browning. Flush is definitely a person, because Flush is really a story about feminism and about running away from Stuffy English Authority To Have Fun In Italy. There's something weird about that, though--writing a story about a helpless dog to show how when Miss Barret's father forbids her from paying the ransom on her helpless dog, he's turning her INTO a dog. Her helplessness was already pretty obvious--was it really necessary to do this? But Woolf isn't afraid of being heavy-handed when she wants to be.

It could also talk to Jekyll&Hyde as a story about Nasty Things That Happen in London. And with all my later-18th/early-19th-century novels about Nasty Things Fathers Do To Daughters.

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

A few notes on finishing so I can scrape clean the outer edge of my brain for a while and think about something else.

Other works on my list it's explicitly interested in: Paradise Lost, Ulysses (both get echoed). Also there are Dickens jokes, and lots and lots of other jokes, but not of things I'm reading for this exam.

The transformation/metamorphosis thing could be good to talk about--Salahuddin becomes Saladin becomes the Devil, becomes Saladin becomes Salahuddin once again. He's trading selves, letting other people define him (letting England shorten his name when he goes to school, then letting the immigration officials define him as a devil when he transforms after being arrested at Rosa Diamond's house), then chooses at the end to define himself as his father defined him, reverting to his birth-name again. (Does this count as self-determination, to accept his father? I'm not sure. It IS less malicious than the police defining him, anyway...) Also the other freaks in the secret hospital ward--'they have the power of description over us,' one of them says about the customs/immigration officials, 'and we turn into how they've described us.' Racism as poesis--the novel is doing the same damn thing with its described world. (Gibreel tries to do the same thing, too, at the end, by making movies about how he's the archangel--does he succeed? Only in a shitty way. But shooting himself in the mouth with a gun he summons from Aladdin's magic lamp is kind of awesome.)

The narrator is an "I" at like two points in the whole novel. I don't know who the "I" is. It seems to be observing both Gibreel and Saladin/Salahuddin at various times like it has to be a personal narrator, but the novel's not very interested in pushing this. So it's just unattached and only slightly creepy. The rest of the time it behaves like a regular old impersonal narrator.

Realism: Magical Realism is a kind of extreme realism, after all--it takes ordinary boring things (clothes, body parts, car windshields) and makes them EXTRAordinary, but it does this by always paying such extremely close attention to their materiality that it seems that everything--the real world around is--could be transformed in this way. That if we just paid attention, we too would see the Arabian Sea parting and an angel made out of butterflies floating over it. (Realism of the 'describing objects in Dickensian/Chekhovian parlors' sort is a less crazy version of the same thing -- if you just paid attention to the gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, it argues, you'd already have foreseen that same gun going off in Act V. The objects themselves have no duty to have their observation tell quotidian stories--Chekhov's gun might as well turn into a spaceship as shoot someone in the face. It's not the materiality or its observation that's responsible for this--it's the rules of the fictional universe that do. But I have no idea how to talk about this in a structuralist way, except to note that, as we should already know by now, talking about physical reality is no guarantee of 'realism.' Things that are real have no duty to be also Real--they are just as free to be Magical. (And the point of being Magical is to show that the Real is ordinarily crazy, if you only pay enough attention to notice it.)

04 November 2009

Thomas Hobbes Is OUT OF HIS MIND

Leviathan is about three things:
  1. Political trouble—he's writing in the middle of the Civil War, which makes his obsession with the security of sovereign power and the rights of subjects not to be abused by their sovereign make more sense.
  2. Religious conflict—the reason for this political trouble, Hobbes suggests, is in conflicts about the role of the church in running the state. In this way, he seems to be arguing for the English Civil War as just an aspect of larger Continental religious conflicts.
  3. Signification—the reason that people fight about religion, Hobbes argues, is that they don't understand how to read the Bible. There is ONE appropriate reading of anything in the Bible, and that reading is Hobbes'. So he spends a long time setting up the reason why St. Peter is the 'foundation of the Church,' or why, stylistically, it is impossible that any of the Old Testament was written down by the characters in it. The secret to everything, Hobbes suggests, is in proper interpretation—although the Pope isn't the Antichrist (he spends some time on this), he can't read properly and so isn't of whatever weird variety of Anglicanism (I guess?) that Hobbes belongs to. Also inside the focus on meaning/definition/interpretation is a conviction that all political conflict is caused by people misunderstanding the power of the sovereign and the duties and rights of the subjects. So he defines this too, at great length, in the first book.
Although this bit is pretty rational, Hobbes also writes some Very Wacky Shit. So, for example, here's the end of Book IV ("Of the Kingdom of Darkness"):

When the fairies are displeased with anybody, they are said to send their elves to pinch them. The ecclesiastics, when they are displeased with any civil state, make also their elves, that is, superstitious, enchanted subjects, to pinch their princes, by preaching sedition; or one prince, enchanted with promises, to pinch another.

The fairies marry not; but there be amongst them incubi that have copulation with flesh and blood. The priests also marry not.

The ecclesiastics take the cream of the land, by donations of ignorant men that stand in awe of them, and by tithes: so also it is in the fable of fairies, that they enter into the dairies, and feast upon the cream, which they skim from the milk.

What kind of money is current in the kingdom of fairies is not recorded in the story. But the ecclesiastics in their receipts accept of the same money that we do; though when they are to make any payment, it is in canonizations, indulgences, and masses.

To this and such like resemblances between the papacy and the kingdom of fairies may be added this, that as the fairies have no existence but in the fancies of ignorant people, rising from the traditions of old wives or old poets: so the spiritual power of the Pope (without the bounds of his own civil dominion) consisteth only in the fear that seduced people stand in of their excommunications, upon hearing of false miracles, false traditions, and false interpretations of the Scripture.

According to Hobbes, Catholics are evil fairies who will pinch you, make you raise their illegitimate incubus children, steal your cream, and make you believe in them by getting old women to lie to you about their existence. What are you DOING, Hobbes? Where did the rationality go???