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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, continued

The Memoirs are weird. Lucy Hutchinson, the Colonel's wife, writes them but she never identifies herself, and sometimes talks about herself in the third person. When she does this, she lets the reader know what "Mrs. Hutchinson" is thinking, even though she never calls herself as "I" or "me." For example, at one point, "My Lord of Portland and Mr. Howard came to Mrs. Hutchinson's lodgings...and my lord left her a message, that he must needs speak with her, upon a message of much concernment; whereupon she sought out my lord, knowing that he had professed much kindness and obligation to her husband, and thinking he might have some design not to acknowledge it by some real assistance" (279 of the Everyman ed., italics mine).

Also sometimes amusing are the details of how when Colonel Hutchinson was governor, he got his people to drink less by building more bars: "He procured unnecessary alehouses to be put down in all the towns, and if any one that he heard of suffered any disorder or debauchery in his house, he would not suffer him to brew any more. He was a little severe against drunkenness, for which the drunkards would sometimes rail at him; but so much were all the children of darkness convinced by his light, that they were more in awe of his virtue than his authority" (289-90).

There's good stuff in here, good enough to make me wish I were enjoying it more, but the way Hutchinson writes makes her prose very difficult to get through.

William Cowper's The Task

The Task was weird. I read it because I'd skimmed Kevis Goodman's chapter in Georgic Modernity and thought maybe the poem would be useful for thinking about personhood and individuality, which is something I've been interested in for a while. (Basically: are people just themselves, or can they be other people too? Where does one person stop and another one end? Does identity change if other things—money, nation, place—are pretty fungible?) I was especially interested in the part where the poem is sitting at home by the fire, talking about reading the news; that part seems like the poem wants to hide from the world and not talk to anyone, but I want to read it as the poem and its speaker being made part of a community through their remove from it. (I want The Task to be about blogging, more or less.) But now I think The Task is more interested in work, and kinds of silly work. It's called the TASK after all—and as the poem wears on, it gets more and more insistent about weaving that word into the end of lines. It likes to talk about various kinds of effort—moral effort, failed effort, frivolous effort, unrecognized efforts. (This is quite like Virgil's Georgics, too, which are at least vaguely about useful things.) Despite this puritanical impulse, The Task is still willing to make fun of itself, and so its biggest 'task' is the growing of tropical fruits and cucumbers in winter—it details how you have to pile up horse shit inside a glass house, have to make sure that the windows on the house are open sometimes to let out the heat because too much heat will kill the plants, have to refresh the poop sometimes or it'll get too cold, have to go around pollinating the flowers on the plants because of course there are no tropical insects to do it for you. And there's something sweet about the elaboration of all this detail: Cowper knows his project is sort of stupid, and dependent on shitty things (all those horrible passages about earthquakes and the apocalypse and how God is punishing England with effeminate fops and the prevalence of pubs), but he wants it to produce something lovely and rare and pleasure-giving as a crisp cucumber in the middle of February. It's kind of nice.

I just wish it weren't so damn long.

Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford

I finished listening to Cranford. It's short—sixteen inter-linked stories about a little village called 'Cranford,' composed mostly of spinsters and crazy widows. The narrator doesn't quite have a name, and not much of a backstory, but she watches everyone and describes everything they're up to with a lot of spirit and tenderness. This narrator is a brilliant way for Gaskell to tie all the observations together.

I'm not sure that it counts as a novel, but this might make it interesting to talk about with other not-quite-novels of earlier centuries. The nineteenth century feels like it has such a hegemony of REAL BIG, PROPER NOVELS, so it's interesting to see Cranford alongside those, and to wonder just how real that hegemony actually was.

George Eliot's Middlemarch

tried to log into this and couldn't remember the title. ninety five works? ninety two? ninety four? thank god for googleaccounts, anyway, or i'd have had to start a new blog.

finished reading middlemarch yesterday, or rather finished listening to librivox read it to me. the scandinavian man is my favorite; the se asian woman is a close second although most of her inflections are confusing; the rest of the readers are varying degrees of only-just-bearable.

we started middlemarch on the grand cross-country roadtrip, on our second day, i think. i'm glad to have taken the roadtrip, and to have read middlemarch—but i'm not sure i liked either that much while they were in process. it's especially hard to listen to the narrator talk about dorothea and casaubon and how dorothea feels trapped by her duty and admiration for her husband, while sitting in a little car for two-and-a-half weeks next to your favorite cousin from childhood for 5500 miles. i kept thinking: i love you, i want to get far away from you, please leave me at the next gas station. i thought that for most of the days after we crossed the mississippi—but at least, unlike dorothea, i didn't have to think this for a year and a half.

20 days aren't so bad, i guess.

the worst thing about middlemarch is how easy i found projecting myself on it. i worried not only that i was dorothea, but that i was casaubon (the nerdiness and rejection of real life in favor of scholarship), and mary garth (the rudeness) and caleb (the use of ridiculous words) and fred vincy (i bought an entire car, in CASH last month. only a fred would do that on my ridiculous stipend) and rosamond (because i tend to love men i've invented, and not the men they actually—although dorothea does this too), and i felt like lydgate every time i wanted to wring my cousin's neck while also wanting to take care of her. i suspect other people have this problem; i suspect every academic i've ever known who's read middlemarch has worried that he or she is casaubon, at least sometimes.

this identification works because george eliot is really good at social observation, which is why i'd wanted to read the novel in the first place. she points out all the horrible things about her characters, but points them out in a usually nice-enough-way that makes it possible to see yourself IN them, and not just try to distance yourself FROM them. (that is, she does that with the main characters. for the rustics who keep making trouble about the railroad at the end, she doesn't bother keeping them from meanness and ridicule. in general, poor people aren't people in middlemarch.)

probably there are other reasons it works, too. like paranoia. and reading too many novels, which tend to want you to make an example for yourself out of their narratives in the first place (or at least pre-modern novels do. i'm not sure ulysses wants you to do anything except stop making nasty comments about jews, and that's easy enough as a lesson.)

also: we know that only crazy people read fiction and say things like 'i'm john marcher.' but so i guess that means i'm crazy.

Persuasion—the beginning and the end

Here's what Jane Austen's Persuasion is about:

Girl—smart, sensible, aristocratic, loving—marries silly, pretty aristocrat with a gambling problem. They have three daughters and then she dies. Middle daughter is the only one who inherited her character. Best friend looks out for middle daughter (because widower is completely incapable of being a good patriarch), but fails when daughter falls in love with a sea-captain. She loves him, in part, because he reminds her of her dead mother. They want to marry, but best friend thinks it's a bad idea and convinces widower-father to also disagree.

Eight years pass. Middle daughter learns to think for herself; refuses to marry eldest son of local squire, although best friend was in favor; youngest daughter marries him instead. Youngest and eldest daughters both never quite grew up, but seem not to feel the loss of their mother as middle daughter does.

Middle daughter gets older and—she thinks—uglier. She tries mothering her father and sisters, but ends up mostly being abused by them in subtle ways instead. Father becomes too poor to support the country estate, and ends up renting it out to the sister and brother-in-law of middle daughter's old suitor. Older sister and father take off for Bath; middle daughter stays with her mother's best friend and then her younger sister for a couple months.

Old suitor comes to visit his sister; seems to be courting one of youngest daughters' sisters-in-law. Middle daughter can't breathe when they're in the same room together. Her nephew falls out of a tree but isn't hurt; she mothers him because his mother won't, and the nursemaid is also irresponsible. She thinks her old suitor has forgotten her, but hears him perhaps alluding to her in his conversations with one of the women he's courting. Great anxiety and self-criticism and awkwardness ensues.

They go on a group trip to the seashore to visit his old Navy friends. She talks about Byron and Scott with his injured friend; sister-in-law jumps from a wall and hits her head; she's okay, but during her long convalescence, the in-laws and the Navy friends become close. Middle daughter observes all kinds of motherliness on the part of those families, is praised indirectly by old suitor for being a good care-giver herself. Extremely pleased.

Old suitor ends up not marrying either one of the girls, who are both otherwise affianced. He and she must admit to themselves that they're still in love; awkwardness and anxiety again ensue; they hardly speak to each other. He suspects she's going to marry her cousin who's also in Bath; she is pleased at the cousin's flirtation, but disapproves of his character. Father and older sister reveal themselves to be superficial children; mother's best friend's influence reaches an all-time low as she almost disappears into other concerns in Bath society. Middle daughter hangs out a lot with an old school friend (slightly older than herself) who is now ill and poor but had been a great comfort to her when they were young—now middle daughter comforts the friend. Suitor's sister and brother-in-law (the tenants) also come to Bath and prove acceptable parent-substitutes to middle daughter, who begins to identify with what she sees as their more sensible, compassionate bourgeois worldview. Her younger sister's mother-in-law also proves a strong source of comfort and approval.

She and old suitor are accidentally forced to speak to each other in various situations; finally he blurts out that he's afraid she's in love with her cousin, and that he loves her; she tells him she has no intentions of marrying that man, and that she's loved him since before they broke off their first engagement, but that she feels it was her duty to take her mother's best friend's advice then. (Now, though, he's quite rich—there will be no objections this time.) They marry.