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.)

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???

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.