Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House

Here are the notes I took on it in the basement of Alderman:

MAR-vuhl

• prospective poem (like "Cooper's Hill"; also bring in Cindy on description?)
• rural shit—"Georgics," "The Task," but there are HUMANS in "Appleton House"
• buildings and their ruins and STRUCTURE—of building described, AND of poem—Pamela as a story about the interiors of buildings/characterological interiority. And trying to get inside buildings as an allegory for rape—Pamela, Shamela, Evelina.

"Height with a certaing race doees bend,

But low things clownishly ascend." (59-60)

—something about satire, maybe even Burney's mockery of middle-class pretensions in Evelina

later men become grasshoppers in "the abyss.../Of that unfathomable grass"—poetry about the English Civil War, class-warfare, the Levellers/Diggers had a rebellion that Lord Fairfax (Appleton's owner) was involved in squashing. Will Hume's history of the Civil War explain enough of this to me???

Puritan woodpeckers chopped down the royalist oak with their beaks 'cause it was rotten inside.

• Building as chastity belt:

XII

And oft she spent the summer suns

Discoursing with the subtle nuns.

Whence in these words one to her weaved,

(As 'twere by chance) thoughts long conceived.

XIII

'Within this holy leisure we

Live innocently as you see.

These walls restrain the world without,

But hedge our liberty about.

These bars inclose the wider den

Of those wild creatures, callèd men.

The cloister outward shuts its gates,

And, from us, locks on them the grates.'

(93-104)

Allegories of temptation—the evil prioress wants Isabella Thwaites to become a lesbian slut nun

• and "Paradise Lost"
• and Pilgrim's Progress
• allegory of the Protestant Reformation in England—but how does work with contemporary Puritan/Anglican stuff?

This is the same year Leviathan comes out—what can I say about THAT???

Does a Herrick and has a sexy dream about ivy:

And ivy, with familiar trails,

Me licks, and clasps, and curls, and hales.

Under this antic rope I move

Like some great prelate of the grove.

Then languishing with ease, I toss

On pallets swoll'n of velvet moss. (591-6)

What??? Why is the speaker an embodied person here? Is this an appropriate move for young Maria Fairfax's tutor to make in a poem? What is Marvell doing? (naughty tutors and sex in gardens: see Julie)

Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

It turned out to be a very good text for thinking about how the nineteenth-century novel thinks about selfhood. Dr. Jekyll is a nice man, well respected by his fellow doctors and other professional old single men in London (the character who spends a lot of time investigating his 'strange case' is his friend, the lawyer Mr. Utterson). But Jekyll also has strange tendencies that he worries are evil—he has a "certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public" (ed. Emma Lately, 60). There's no way of telling what, actually, Jekyll's "impatient gaiety of disposition" leads him to do, although his singleness, and Victorian paranoia about London's moral and hygienic depravity, suggest that he may have a fondness for whores.

Anyway, his solution, as a doctor, is to find a medicine that will allow him to split his personality into two—when he's Dr. Jekyll, he's overwhelmingly good but also slightly bad; when he takes the drug, he's Mr. Hyde, and he's all bad. (Where does the good disappear to when he does this? Is the new Dr. Jekyll actually ALL good, since Mr. Hyde was ALL bad? The novella won't say, leaves it deliberately open. There are some interesting arguments about Calvinist stuff in here, I think—and Stevenson was raised in Scotland, so he certainly had room and biographical background to make these arguments. But he won't, because he's not from the seventeenth century—poo on him.) Mr. Hyde does several appalling things, like walking directly over a small child in the street when Mr. Utterson meets him for the first time. (It's not clear HOW you just walk over an 8-year-old, but because this is also a horror novel, the unimaginability of this act makes it terrifying.) But Jekyll learns that splitting himself is dangerous—shades of nuclear bomb-making, shades of Voldemort and his horcruxes (although of course the influence goes the other way—but it's what I'm thinking)—because eventually he can't stay Jekyll: he keeps turning involuntarily into Hyde. (It's not clear that Hyde really gets to have much fun when he's in that persona, either—mostly he seems to stay in his room, snapping at the servants, and making himself tea. When he goes out, he just walks over little kids, and once murders an M.P. Where are the whores? Where's the ludicly evil fun that being Hyde was supposed to allow???) Meanwhile, Jekyll/Hyde's building up a tolerance to the drug and needs more and more of it to switch, which is complicated by the fact that he can't get a supply of the precise strain of it he was using when he started all this mess. So on one level, this is just a story about opiate addiction (that was how I read it when I was ten—I'd picked the book up in the library, but understood it as an extension of the D.A.R.E. program). In the end, Jekyll can't hold off turning into Hyde any longer; he fixes himself a beaker of the stuff and is about to drink it, but dies in the process of his transformation.

So what happens to the self? When Jekyll is dead, so is Hyde (and had Hyde died, Jekyll would have to, too). Stevenson isn't going to offer any answers. Instead, I think, he wants to just set up something horrible—gothic—that's self-explanatory up to a certain point, but also has certain gaps in its explanation of things. These gaps are terrible, because they're spots where an explanation of the self should go, and instead there just isn't anything there.

Edith Wharton on Ethan Frome

Terribly depressing, even in a tub full of organic orange-scented suds, which you'd think would dispel some of that Western-Massachusetts-in-the-dead-of-winter-and-terminal-sexual-frustration gloom. But no. A really disturbing novel. Like the other gothic on my list (Castle of Otranto), it's fascinated with the terrible emotional things people who should love each other but don't do to each other in houses full of malevolent objects. Instead of Walpole's giant shield and helmet, Wharton's got a broken glass pickle dish (pickle dish pictures here) and a bottle of glue. And some medicine bottles, I guess, and a lot of fur robes for keeping warm in. Wharton's objects don't have the same agency Walpole's do, but they still are crucial to marking the turning points in the narrative—because Ethan and Mattie never have sex (or do much more than kiss three times and try to kill themselves once), they have to be ashamed of breaking the pickle dish instead, which they then hide as a bizarre little reification of their guilty desire for each other. (But it's so SHITTY, just like the shitty office Ethan puts together for himself as the last individuated space in his house of women—the last place where he can be himself. Except that it's got a shitty couch he made himself, and a cushion his wife embroidered for him, and they're both really shitty to show that his life is also shitty. That's what upsets me about Wharton—she's having a lot of fun making their economic and intellectual poverty an emblem of their emotional poverty. Can I pause a moment and call Wharton on making such a snobby move? ... Okay, now I can move on.)

Otranto was about how patriarchy will kill you. (A lot of what I've been reading from the 1760's has been about how patriarchy will kill you—although I mistakenly watched Dead Poets Society last night, and in between getting really cranky with it, I decided it's definitely a story about how patriarchy wants everyone dead. 'S because there are no other available villains in a story that wants to be about the ultimate triumph of good, but has the disadvantage of being set in a world of rich white young men—they already have almost everything, so it's very hard to make them victims. The movie can only do it by making the people they're supposed to grow up to be extremely evil, so that the movie's able to make it seem reasonable, for heaven's sake, when the main character kills himself because he isn't allowed to act in another production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In a less ridiculous atmosphere, you'd notice easier that this is a really really stupid suicide narrative...) But Ethan Frome seems to be about how women will kill you, instead. Sure, the women may be dangerous because they're endangered by patriarchal society—but it's Ethan's dead mother's decline that scares the shit out of him in the first place, it's Zenobia's tendency to spend money on vibrators and kidney pills that's most immediately bankrupting the farm, and it's Mattie's idea that Ethan kill them both by steering the sled into the elm tree. Like the victimized female heroines of the sentimental novels I've been reading, Ethan has no agency of his own—he just reacts to what the women around him want. Elaine Showalter has a fairly crazy introduction to the novel in the Oxford World's Classics edition where she talks about the castrating feminine maternal body of the farmhouse, and she's getting at something there, although she does say it in a typically CRAZY way. Anyway. Scary women feel like a new thing in my reading list.

William Congreve, The Way of the World

Dryden would have approved of the double plot, which ties itself up nicely because all the characters are related to each other or friends with each other or sleeping with each other. Some young gallants try to keep an aunt from marrying again so that they'll end up with her fortune, but unlike Jonson's Epicene, the aunt never gets her money taken away from her. (So the nephew's inheritance is still safe? It's not clear—no one ever actually mentions the money, but since that's always what's at stake in plays about aunts and uncles getting married, the presumptive inheritance must be what's moving the plot here, too.)

There are a LOT of Jonson references, really—a dumb cousin comes in from the country and someone mentions Bartholmew Fair; when the gallants discuss how they'll keep the aunt from marrying the suitor, they mention Mosca in Volpone to explain how, if the fake suitor did get proposed to, he'd demand too many conditions in the marriage settlement for the aunt to agree to it—and he'd do this not because he didn't want to marry her, but because they'd already had him married that morning to another servant. But a better Jonson parallel for a story about a fake marriage would have been Epicene—and I can't figure out why Congreve doesn't use that, instead.

Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesie

This one is weird. Four London dramatists with Classical names—Neander, Lisideius, Crites, and Eugenius—get in a barge and go floating down the Thames on June 3, 1665. They get in the boat so they can hear the naval battle going on between the English and the Dutch at Lowestoft, but then instead of paying attention to the sound of cannons (the battle is never mentioned in the course of the Essay), they argue about the role of verisimilitude in contemporary English Drama. Topics include:

• How artificial (=contorted?) the syntax of plays should be
• Whether multiple plots are okay and if so what they're supposed to accomplish
• Whether blank verse is better than rhyme, or whether rhyme is better than blank verse
• Whether one character telling another to shut the door is properly part of the dramatic action or not and so whether it should or shouldn't be in verse

I'd forgotten that the Essay isn't just Dryden saying what he thinks plays should do—because he has four different characters debating with each other, they're able to offer different opinions and interpretations of similar themes (number of plots, number of humors in the various characters, degree of artificiality in language) without having to come up with any single opinion. So that's nice, although I think a lot of critics who cite Dryden quickly (particularly Jonson critics, who like to dwell on how Neander thinks Jonson's not quite in Shakespeare's league) forget that it isn't just Dryden talking: that he's representing a less individuated and more social picture of what 1660's London dramatists were doing. So basically, I guess, my reading of the Essay is just a reminder to myself not to over-simplify when treating criticism that everyone refers to but doesn't read fully. (Sadly, there's almost no other reason to read the Essay. It's dreadfully boring. But those who cite it without reading it through—see me, spring of 2008—get a distorted sense of the opinions and attitudes it offers about the state of the play.)

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.

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.

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.

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.