Paul Hunter, Before Novels

Before Novels is making me ANGRY. It's early in the morning, I've been doing way too much reading lately and too little talking to people, and so I've decided that I Hate New Historicism And Everything It Stands For. And I really like ahistoricist formalism, except that I sort of hate everyone who does it. So.

On the other hand, John Dunton sounds like a delightful man, and I hope to get to read some of him next spring.

Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance

She may be dull, but she knows what she's talking about:

Hortensius. I rejoice that you do not defend Circulating libraries,—if yon [sp] had, I would have fought against them with more success, than I have met with hitherto, when I have been your opponent.

Euphrasia. I am entirely of your opinion, they are one source of the vices and follies of our present times; and we shall have occasion to say more of them when we come to draw inferences from the effects of novel-reading upon the manners.

Hort. They have been well ridiculed in Mr. Colman's farce called Polly Honeycombe.

Euph. In some respects, but the Satire would have been much stronger and the moral more commendable, if he had not exhibited the parents as objects of Ridicule; which spoils the effect, and puts it upon a footing with too many other Dramatic pieces upon the same plan.

Sophronia. I am delighted with your remark, and have often been offended with this dramatic error: it is so general that most of the plays seem calculated to teach our youth, that they are wiser than their parents, and that they may safely deceive and ridicule them.

Hort. You say true, there is hardly a play where one does not meet with these absolute children and undutiful parents, and the poets always take care to punish the latter, and reward the former.

Euph. This likewise is one of the evils of our times; but we will not enlarge upon it here, as it is foreign to our present subject.

Soph. I beg your pardon!—undutiful parents and arbitrary children are as frequently found in Novels as upon the Stage, and the remark is equally proper upon both kinds of writing.

Euph. I cannot deny it.—But I shall neither applaud, nor recommend any that have a tendency to weaken the respect due to parents; for upon that depends in a great measure, the education of youth, their introduction into life, and indeed all the social and domestic virtues.

Hort. It was I that led you into this useful observation:—I do not repent it, nor will I reckon the time as lost.

(from The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries, and Manners; with Remarks on the Good and Bad Effects of It, on them Respectively; in a Course of Evening Conversations. Vol. II, Evening IX, pp.7-11[9].)

Conflicts between parents and children—whose roles Sophronia cleverly switches—are totally the plot of all the 18th-c novels I've read so far. Her thesis that children were behaving badly because they'd read Richardson and Fielding needs a little re-consideration—LMWM notes that reading Clarissa (pub.1748) in the late 1750's painfully reminded her of her of her own courtship in the early 1710's—but when Reeve pins responsibility for children's bad behavior on the novel, she gives fiction a whole lot of social power, and this is interesting.

I HATE Lucy Snowe.

Samuel Pepys and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Personal prose is boring. I know that it's supposed to be boring, but it still bothers me. Pepys writes about very ordinary things, and he writes it all to himself but maybe with the hope that people would find it among all the papers he left to Magdalen, and read it again. So I read his 1666 diary, which is the one where London mostly recovers from the plague but then burns half down in September. In the midst of this, there's a lot of gossip and bitching—what rumor was circulating at court about Charles' favorite mistress's childhood masturbatory habits, how bad Sir William Penn's poop smelled in April, when he emptied his chamberpot while Sam and Elizabeth were hanging out on their roof next door and had to go in because of the smell, what the Queen's doctor said about the membranes of her aborted fetus's corpse (from the membranes, she was just as healthy as any other woman with a lot of babies). Elizabeth never had babies; Sam had a lot of mistresses, some of whom did have babies, although it's not clear whether the babies were his. (He would have written it in his diary, if he thought so.) He's worried about his testicles; Elizabeth is worried about her teeth. Their house doesn't burn down, but they lose some money. At the end of the year, though, they have more plate than they've ever had before.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did write for an audience—for her best friend and her husband and her sister and her daughter and her other friends, including Alexander Pope and women she'd grown up with and the man she fell in love with when she was fifty, and the exiled Jacobite who became her substitute child, along with his wife, for like a decade when they were all in Italy. She has the advantage over Pepys that she actually went places and saw stuff, too—made fun of the relics in a Catholic church in Austria, made fun of the preacher's hat at a Calvinist church in Holland, visited the late Sultan's favorite mistress outside Constantinople, flirted with lords in Venice, visited a lady's bath in Constantinople (if English ladies went around in public naked, she says, they'd make less fuss about faces—she'd had smallpox already at this point, and was a little sensitive about her face, I guess). When she got old, she retired to a country house she'd bought between Lake Iseo and Milan, where she read a lot of novels her daughter sent her. She liked Smollett, liked some H. Fielding, thought S. Fielding was stupid (the Fieldings were both her first cousins), and resented Richardson for being annoying and compelling at the same time. A lot of her letters are tedious as hell. They're interesting though for showing how she's a different subject for different audiences, which is something that very little of the epistolary fiction I've read has been interested in, I'm not sure why.

Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, excerpts from The Spectator

Then I read some of The Spectator, parts where they wrote about taste and imagination and making things up and why Chinese gardens are prettier than English ones (it's because English gardens are obviously fake, and so can't be imagined as much) and also on how Locke says that everything you see is just your brain making it up anyway because you don't really see with your eyes but with your brain. They do this after they spend four or five very boring essays writing about Paradise Lost, which they discuss in terms of character and passion and other things that were boring. In retrospect, though, the PL stuff is a good case-study for the taste/imagination stuff—because what they like about Milton is his tendency to make you see things that can't exist or were never there or are too big to be really contemplated by a single viewpoint. The point is that you're putting together the fall of the rebel angels and the war between Hell and Heaven and whatever only in your brain, and the poem's ability to make you do that is what makes it so special.

They seem to be boosting Paradise Lost because it's in English—it may not be better than The Aeneid, but it's more accessible. But more accessible to whom? In the taste and imagination stuff, they leave bits of Greek untranslated, as though their general readership should be able to figure that out. But in the Milton stuff, they mention "English readers" as readers of the English language exclusively, not as readers who happen to live in England. I didn't know that The Spectator was aiming at people who couldn't read Latin—and, by aiming at them, sort of tacitly admitting that it's okay that they can't. I wasn't expecting to find that from Mr. Spectator.

Erich Auerbach on Mimesis

Mimesis was big. Enormous. I've been reading it for far too long. It's about realism, whatever the fuck that is, and Auerbach wants to get at it in two ways—by talking about Jesus, and by talking about class. The religion and the Marxism are actually tied up together because Jesus permits realism by introducing poor people as important people. Unlike Euryclea in The Odyssey (well, really more like the maids), poor people in the New Testament of the Bible are a very real and necessary part of the action. And talking about poor people practically guarantees realism because poor people do stuff—their lives interact with objects and teem with events that are real and boring and very ordinary. (Rich people just fantasize about courtly romance; poor people poop. In Auerbach's reckoning, rich people never poop and poor people never have ridiculous fantasies.)

He's also a goddamned structuralist, and wants to talk about how sentences and verses and things are constructed, so that he can show you that the realism is there in the very grammar and meter of the things he's quoting. Eh—sort of, but why is it so important to demonstrate that even the conjunctions care about realism? That god-is-in-the-details kind of reading is starting to feel untrustworthily glib.

Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer

She Stoops to Conquer is about people who feel more like people than I was expecting to find on the late-eighteenth-century stage. It's a courtship plot and a practical joke, and it reads a lot more like Tom Jones or The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph or The Fool of Quality or even Clarissa than I was ready to deal with. (It's about a sloppy son, on one hand, and a daughter whose father doesn't like her fiance on the other.) None of it really needs to be on stage, except that it gets some mileage out of the daughter's changing her outfit to look like a barmaid. And the staging is available to make the mistake about the house/inn more concrete. But otherwise it could be a novel, which seems surprising. Have I read any novels that could be plays? I don't think so.

Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness

Has almost no plot. Has almost no people. It's a horror novel, of a kind—the point is to be really creeped out, at the end, and to understand that Conrad wants you to know that racism is the worst thing that there is in the whole wide world. Also some other stuff. Colonialism will kill you. Capitalism will make you a whore. Heterosexuality is probably bad, too. In fact, all kinds of desire are terrible and will only induce misery. There's a boat. There are some things about how humans might actually be like the most machine-like of animals (like viruses? like worms?), and all our attempts at civilization are a very silly attempt to cover that. Okay, fine. But what's the point of that kind of writing?

Lisa Zunshine on Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel

LZ says that we read novels so that we can exercise our facility at "theory of mind"—so that we can practice recognizing when other people are people, and how we can tell, and what we can do with that realization. It seems reasonable, at least about the novels that she picks to examine. A lot of them are stories about grotesque personages—Lovelace from Clarissa, Humbert from Lolita. I mean, can that really be the appeal of fiction about really boring, ordinary people? Does reading Raymond Carver really exercise my theory of mind?

Trollope's Barchester Towers and Walter Scott's Waverley

Both are kind of stupid novels. Barchester Towers is about several clergymen and their families in an imaginary county that Trollope made up. The main problem of the novel is that their world might, possibly, change—there is a new Bishop, and the new Bishop brings with him a new guy, and the new guy has new ideas, and might marry various unmarried women in the families of the clergymen, and then an old guy shows up with his family whom everyone forgot about, and so they are new, and they have new and dangerous ideas (they've come from ITALY), and then the new guy gets in a fight with one of the old guys, so they send for another new guy—whose ideas are properly conservative, so it's okay—and the new new guy shows up, and of course he and the old new guy are both in love with the same woman, but finally the new new guy gets her, and all this is happy, and that's the end of the novel.

It's an incredibly frustrating thing to read. What's valuable about reading it? I'm not sure. I put it on my list after having bought it four or five years ago on the advice of Stephen Booth, who said he thought it was "funny." I suspect he found the backbiting clergy and the overbearing wives and browbeaten husbands funny, but I just kept wanting to hurl Barchester Towers across the room. Didn't, though. Finished it, but maybe I shouldn't have.

Waverley is called a novel, but it might not be one. It's about Edward Waverley, who is young and pretty (he looks good in a kilt, we learn) and likes to read fiction but knows little about the world. He goes to Scotland in 1745 as part of the pro-Hanoverian army, but he falls in love with the daughter of a highland chieftain who tells him she won't marry him because he's not a Jacobite. He quits the army and goes on a hunting expedition in which he is wounded, and taken back to the chieftain's house, but before he gets there the girl who's in love with him has him kidnapped—she's the daughter of a lowland Baron or something, and also a childhood friend of the chieftain's daughter—and sent off to Edinburgh, where he's presented to Charles Stuart, and of course he doesn't decline CS's offer that he join the Jacobite army. There's a battle. EW does nothing very interesting, except wince when his captain from his old English regiment is killed. He takes a prisoner, Captain Talbot, whom he releases when CT learns that his wife has lost the baby she was pregnant with and might die herself. EW then runs away, sort of by accident again—he doesn't decide to desert, but it just happens. (He never really decided to join the Jacobite army, either—other people made it happen.) He gets arrested, but is treated well, but then he's rescued by someone who thinks he's another Edward, and so he isn't charged with treason. He sees a newspaper that says his father in London is having to pay all sorts of bail because of EW's treason, so he takes a coach down. It takes three weeks, and he sits next to a very annoying woman who keeps wanting to pump him for stories, and he has to keep avoiding telling her that he's the famous traitor Edward Waverley, but otherwise nothing else happens. He sees CT, who tells him that his father, although dead, wasn't in any trouble at all. EW goes back to Edinburgh, because he's in love with the girl who had him kidnapped. He travels down and gets her father to consent to their marriage. Then he goes back to London. The highland chieftain's son is being tried for treason, and EW watches him hang. Then he goes back home, and his bride arrives and they're going to get married. Then they go see her father, who now lives in a cave. EW and CT get involved in some complicated real estate, and in the end CT buys EW's wife's father's home and says that father and EW and wife can all live there for the length of father's life, so they do.

So. Waverley doesn't do much, makes almost no decisions, and makes a muddle of everything. He's a failure, essentially—except that he sees interesting things, encounters exotic Scottish personages, and looks nice in a kilt. The plot of Waverley is also sort of stupid—every time something happens, it's an accident, which is disappointing in a novel that's supposed to be about heroism and wars and stuff. It's tempting to say that Scott is being satirical when he does this, but I don't think Scott is really that smart about his fiction.