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."

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.

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.)

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???

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.)