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.)

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.

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.

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.

Copperfield: Or Only Seventy-Eight More to Go...

Still reading Copperfield, which I'm still enjoying but now have started resenting, too. (It's Long. LONG.) Listening to it streamed from Libri Vox, read by people with good voices. The chapter in which David/Trotwood goes with Steerforth to the theater is wonderful. D/T is drunk, having had Steerforth and his college friends to dinner in his new apartment. He buys too much wine, and then drinks a lot of it, hoping that Steerforth's friends will like him and stop thinking he's very young (which he is). Steerforth's friends are themselves insecure about their youth, though, because one of them keeps referring to himself as "a man." That is, he doesn't use the first-person, just speaks of himself in third. For (a non-Dickensian) example: "A man has got to speak about himself in the third person when he isn't quite comfortable with who he is, and means to display his insecurity in the most affected way possible."

But David/Trotwood is drunk, and at the theater, and doesn't know who or where he is after a while. Before getting there, he (the narrator) had been describing the dinner and the drunkenness and the state of the wine bottles in the usual first-person past-tense, but after a while these pronouns shift into a hazy "someone" (like "someone was vomiting in a corner"), and then finally says, "someone was me." But he goes on describing himself like this, from the outside, like Steerforth's vaguely unpleasant friend "a man." All of which works incredibly well when they're at the theater, and D/T is behaving very drunk in the box during the intermission (and after the intermission, although he doesn't seem to realize it and doesn't understand why everyone keeps shushing him), and the "someone" becomes frighteningly distant—especially frightening because his foster-sister Agnes is there in the box, too, and seems embarrassed to recognize him, as though he really IS someone else.

Later D/T has a melodramatic and very self-pitying hangover, and is ashamed about this transgression of personality. The "someone" has already accomplished the othering before D/T realizes it, though—we were getting it from the first "someone" (it is almost too obvious when the narrator identifies D/T as the someone), and so we're wrapped up in the little moebius-strip of D/T's/the narrator's understanding of himself, and when this understanding takes place.

Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

1. Like Quixote, it's obsessed with its own fictitiousness. When Oroonoko arrives in Suriname, he hears from Trefry about this beautiful, beautiful slave girl—and of course when Oroonoko meets her, she turns out to be Imoinda. He tells Trefry (who loves stories about love) their history—and, the narrator notes, "Trefry was infinitely pleased with this novel" (Oxford UP, ed. Salzman, 43). Salzman has a very note in the back: "novel: i.e. new thing, though perhaps with a reference to the nouvelle/novel as a literary form in the Restoration concerned with such narrative turns" (n. 43, 271); this hesitancy seems to me much more cautious than is necessary—Behn is highly interested in discussing truth and fiction, and is very much in control of her novel's dalliance with metafiction.

There are several discussions of how lying—the bad fictiveness—is a uniquely European thing: the Surinamese natives don't have the concept, and Oroonoko's people, when he's at home, consider lying extremely dishonorable. The Englishmen in the novel, on the other hand, are constantly affirming their truthfulness on Jesus' dead body and then doing shitty dishonest things. The narrator is very critical.

The narrator also acknowledges that her audience may not believe her about the wonders of the new world, and so she offers all sorts of details about the snakes and fish and eels and birds and monkeys in Surinam, and corroborates them by noting that she had a cape of one kind of feathers sent back to London to be used in a production of 'The Indian Queen.' (Another acknowledgment of the fantasy of this exotic place is when the narrator talks about the eel that makes the catcher weak and sick—she says that Englishmen won't believe there is such a thing so cold as it could do that.) But of course setting up the 'reality' of the place is constructed in terms of fiction—the evidence for the birds' reality is that their feathers were sewn into a cape to be used as a costume in a play about the New World. What may be real evidence of America is immediately conscripted into the props for its fictional representation. The narrator seems to want to make it real, but before it can be real, it necessarily becomes fake again. (It also becomes part of someone else's fiction—is put onstage not in an Aphra Behn play, but one by Dryden. Which at least is a nice way of representing how semi-truth is turned into explicit fiction—stories of America that began as sort of true get spun into bigger, wilder stories that are not about any real place at all, but just the imagination of them in listener's heads.)

2. Oh yeah—at one point, she eats an armadillo. Very tender, apparently.

Baby armadillo - by Tom Uhlman/AP Photo

3. The novel loves cruelty. People and occasionally animals keep being killed with an arrow to the eye. There's a description of how the native young men bargain to be chiefs in battle by slicing off bits of their bodies —a nose, an arm—until they've proved they're braver than the other candidates. (As a result, almost all the men are too ugly to look at: the narrator initially takes them for monsters.)

But the novel is most horrified and pleased of all by its recounting of the ten pages it takes Oroonoko to die—first, he's beaten and his wounds rubbed with pepper for leading a slave rebellion, then he recovers a bit (his friends give him a bath, to wash off the pepper) and goes for a walk with Imoinda and cuts her head off, then he spends almost a week with her rotting flower-covered corpse in the woods, then finally he's captured and brought back, nursed a bit, and then killed. Before he's brought back, though, he

cut a piece of flesh from his own throat and threw it at 'em...At that he ripped up his own bely, and took his bowels and pulled 'em out with what strength he could, while some, on their knees imploring, besought him to hold his hand. But when they saw him tottering, they cried out, 'Will none venture on him?'... Tuscan...cried out, 'I love thee, O Caesar, and therefore will not let thee die if possible' and, running to him, took him in his arms, but, at the same time, warding a blow that Caesar made at his bosom, he received it quite through his arm, and Caesar, having not the strength to pluck the knife forth, though he attempted it, Tuscan neither pulled it out himself, nor suffered it to be pulled out, but came down with it sticking in his arm because the air should not get into the wound. (71)

The narrator doesn't want to see this—she's been taken away from the plantation for a few days, when Oroonoko is initially brought back, he smells so bad that she has to go away again: "(Being myself sickly," she says, "and very apt to fall into fits of dangerous illness upon any extraordinary melancholy), the servants and Trefry and the chirurgeons promised all to take what possible care they could of the life of Caesar, and I, taking boat, went with other company to Colonel Martin's, about three days' journey down the river" (71-2).

Because the narrator and Trefry are gone when Oroonoko is killed, his execution is probably narrated by her mother and sister. She's never mentioned them before this paragraph, but now they're on hand to give the last episode of the novel:

He had learned to take tobacco; and when he was assured he should die, he desired they would give him a pipe in his mouth, ready lighted; which they did. And the executioner came, and first cut off his members, and threw them into the fire; after that, with an ill-favored knife, they cut off his ears and his nose and burned them; he still smoked on, as if nothing had touched him; then they hacked off one of his arms, and still he bore up, and held his pipe; but at the cutting off the other arm, his head sunk, and his pipe dropped, and he gave up the ghost, without a groan or a reproach. My mother and sister were by him all the while, but not suffered to save him; so rude and wild were the rabble, and so inhuman were the justices who stood by to see the execution, who after paid dearly enough for their insolence. They cut Caesar in quarters, and sent them to several of the chief plantations: one quarter was sent to Colonel Martin, who refused it, and swore he had rather see the quarters of Banister, and the Governor himself, that those of Caesar, on his plantations; and that he could govern his negroes without terrifying and grieving them with frightful spectacles of a mangled king. (72-73)

There's one more paragraph—reminding us that Oroonoko was "worthy of a better fate," and that Imoinda was "brave, beautiful and constant," and that the novelist is a woman, and so can't celebrate them in the way she would like—and then it ends. WOW.

first hundred pages of Cervantes

I'm reading Don Quixote, in Smollet's cheap translation from Barnes and Noble. (The notes are weird, and so are the illustrations. And the margins aren't big enough to write in. I'm not sure I'd recommend it, but then again $10 isn't bad.)

Right now, I'm enjoying the way the novel keeps toying with its fictionality, reminding me over and over again that it's fake. So when Quixote comes home in tatters from his first brief adventure (the first time he mistakes an inn for a castle -- this is before he has Sancho Panza with him), his niece and housekeeper are worried that reading too many novels has driven him to madness. The priest is there, too, and

desired [them] to hand him the books, one by one, that he might see of what subjects they treated, because he might possibly find some of them that did not deserve to be purged by fire.
"There is not one of them, replied the niecce, which deserves the least mercy, for they are all full of mischief and deceit. You had better, therefore, throw them out of the window into the courtyard, and there set fire to them, in a heap: or, let them be carried into the back-yard, where the bonfire may be made, and the smoke will offend nobody." (Part I, Chapter VI, second paragraph: 42)

So I'm thinking: yes, Cervantes, I get it -- novels are fictional, and potentially dangerous. They might offend uneducated women, or make old men crazy. Butof course he's also doing something smart by having the enemies of fiction respond in such an excessive way: novels suddenly look a lot better, if they're only attacked by the batshitcrazy. Now it becomes impossible for readers to sincerely share in that fear -- and in fact, we're probably supposed to feel sorry for the books being burned like this. (Do novels really need pity, though? Like Don Quixote, they keep getting attacked -- set on fire, in one case, and beat up all the time in the other. Does Quixote need pity? Or does the violence that is done to him just make him funnier -- and the novel a little bit more cruel?)

This thing about cruelty and violence is what's bothering me most, so far. Quixote constantly has vomit, shit, blood, or teeth coming out of his body. At one point, he's being pelted with stones by some shepherds whose sheep he's been killing because he's convinced himself they're enemy knights:

He received a pebble on his side, that seemed to have buried a couple of his ribs in his belly;...there came another almond, so plum upon his hand and cruet, that after having splintered the pot to pieces, it carried off in its way, three or four of his molars, and shattered two of his fingers in a grievous manner: in short, so irresistible were both the applications, that the poor knight could not help tumbling from his horse. The shepherds immediately came up, and believing him actually dead, gathered together their flock with all imaginable dispatch, and taking their dead animals, which might be about seven in number, upon their shoulders, made off without any further inquiry. (Part I, Chapter XVIII, paragraph 10, 129)

I keep wanting to pity Quixote, but there's not really anywhere to put that pity. It's like reading The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and trying to feel sorry for the boys when the squire beats them -- what happens is pitiful, but the description of it only wants you to laugh.