Escallonia Hedge

The Meaning of Grades

2009-06-30T19:00:00.001-07:00

Informal question: If one does not receive A+s consistently, is one therefore not an A+ person with A+ ideas?

Modified question: Do A+s mean someone is doing something great or do they mean that a person has exploited the right pathways, or both?

Connected to question of: Why we cannot take (bad) taste as an indicator of intelligence when that intelligence is measured by grades.

Expressed as: T (?) ≠ I

Related to: The idea that Taste (vs. Appreciation of things, which can be picked up via discipline and passed off as one’s Tastes) is above and beyond discipline.

Perhaps greatness is above and beyond discipline, and this is where taste and intelligence connect. --I am not a Nazi, or a eugenicist.

In any case, take a look at the cool coded grading system they use at Cambridge, explained over at Mary Beard’s A Don’s Life.

Woolf Rant on Woolf and the Past

2009-06-28T12:06:00.000-07:00

Right now I’m reading a book of literary criticism I mentioned awhile ago, Virginia Woolf and the Victorians by Steve Ellis (Cambridge UP, 2009), alongside a very recent publication of memoirs, letters, obituaries, etc. written by Woolf on various people she knew, including herself. The latter is called The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends (the university library has an autographed copy—not VW’s autograph, of course! No, ‘just’ the editor, S. P. Rosenbaum), published in 2007. It includes some things that have never been published before. Of these unpublished tidbits so far I’ve only read the uncensored “Memoir of Julian Bell,” written upon the untimely death of VW’s nephew, Julian Bell; “JB,” a really lovely—almost sweet—satire on Julian’s views on and writing of poetry (family satires were a thing with the Stephens/Woolfs (‘Woolves’ as they sometimes appear in family letters)/Bell boys—a strange family thing); and some “Memoir Notes” JB’s mother, Vanessa, wrote upon his death, scrawled as she lay in bed. As more unpublished bits come I’ll update here.

The satire “JB” I found especially striking: it’s full of very interesting nonsense. It reminds me of how I tried to write at one point because I couldn’t find a sentence or a sense-making group of words that expressed what I thought, only I was writing that way sincerely whereas VW parodies the practice as confusion and excess. The character VW tells the character JB to find a single “image” to express what he means instead of clumping together various descriptors, and then JB tries to figure out what an “image” (simile, metaphor) means! (What is its use; where he can find an example of one; how it’s no good because it’s not GE Moore-ish enough (“how can a thing be like anything else except the thing it is?”).) This in contrast to JB looking at a “male siskin under a microscope” in an effort to compose a poem “in the manner of Gerard Hopkins” (“The siskin’s been dead a week”):

Seepy, creaking, sweeping, with a creaking kind of beating of the penultimate dorsal jutting out femoral crepitational tail. The siskin whisking round the peeled off mouldy bottle green pear tree rivers. Well, I flatter myself that’s a pretty good poem—all true to an inch.

Then there’s a big fuss about finding an image for the siskin, which in the end is arrived at by what JB has for lunch: “The siskin lies like—like cold salt roast beef the siskin lies. My word—that does it.” It’s moments like this I feel like saying “Oh Virginia Woolf, you’re the best!” I think the interesting thing about that line “like cold salt roast beef the siskin lies” is that it sounds beautiful but is being a framed in a way that makes it silly, reaching, and untrue. This is always the interesting thing about Woolf’s satirical moments, I think, and why I would say “Oh VW you’re the best”—many of them are a mixture of a form of sympathy and ridicule. Like Samuel Johnson’s satire manqué. (One of the most embarrassing things I ever passed into a prof was a response on how I sympathised with a character called “Dick Minim” in Johnson’s nos. 60 and 61 of The Idler, and those weren’t satire manqué–so some of this sympathising could just be feeble-mindedness—could be what makes me appreciate the poem in my last post in a sincere way. I think the professor thought I was a bit of a fool, which I suppose I would have to be to attribute poetic impulses to Dick Minim!)

As I was saying earlier, I’ve also been reading Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. The effect of reading The Platform of Time and VWV together is that more than ever I’m aware of the role of heredity in Woolf’s thinking. I know I’ve thought about it before: looking inside my copy of Between the Acts where I see I was desperately at 5 a.m. or so starting to simply write words I thought were important—words I had thought of or that were in the book—and circling them, I find the word “indigenous” (Woolf). Of course, BA is quite clearly about heredity (among other things), so it’s not fair to say ‘Well I’ve thought of this before—it struck me when I was reading BA!’ In any case, heredity is pretty hard to escape with Woolf. She always talks about things in terms of ‘Stephens’ and ‘Bells’--she’s always tracing things back to Clive Bell, her sister’s husband and father of two of three of Vanessa’s children—Clive is always hunting, partying, being “caustic,” refreshingly jolly, a bit of an aristocrat. Stephens are always cerebral, graceful, serious. Then, of course, VW’s literary inheritance is inescapable: her step-aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie (?) (sister to her father’s first wife) daughter to and memorialiser of William Thackeray; the Camerons on her mother’s side and Little Holland house, where they held parties with the Pre-Raphaelites, Tennyson or whoever was who’s who; strolling with Henry James when she was a kid; father reading Walter Scott to them every night of their childhood; and so on. Working from the regard and interest Woolf shows in her predecessors—familial and literary—Ellis looks at how VW compared the Victorians and the modernists; the nostalgia and admiration she had for her father’s age; and the centrality of continuity and the interaction of past and present as values in her work.

There are a couple of interesting coinages Ellis has arrived at so far: “the value of obscurity” and “the pathology of the new.” The first term is situated in VW’s description of lighting and darkness in her novels; modern writing likes to expose everything in a glaring, too-present and almost hard reality, whereas shadows in the writing of the past and in writing that is conscious of the past create interesting nuances and depth. I’ve just finished reading Ellis linking this to VW’s famous essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” in which I recall (and which Ellis cites) Woolf lamenting (almost complaining, but not quite) that “the old decorums” between writer and reader have been cast aside by her generation of writers. Her generation are so eager to break things, expose them to a hard glare (ahem obscenity in Joyce’s Ulysses VW says), they don’t value what I think Woolf seems to be getting at as an idea of pleasure in the reading experience: she misses days of reading a book “in the shade” (another passage Ellis is eager and right to cite). The second term, “the pathology of the new,” is really a converse articulation of the above: something to attribute to a writer who is blind to “the value of obscurity.” That’s not what we would say in my class on earlier 20th c poetry! --Well, that’s not quite true. A lot of the class was about confronting—as opposed to dismissing—the problems of literary value and difficulty that arose in modernist poetry, problems that can be traced back to the disregard of what VW calls writerly “decorums.”

Getting back to heredity. All I really meant to post today was this: There’s a lovely (what VW would call, did call) ‘scene’ in VW’s memoir of Julian Bell that made me return to Between the Acts. It’s just after VW has angered JB by sending away his Chinese girlfriend (at the request of his mother, unbeknownst to him)—“Damned Cambridge insolence” VW calls it. JB stops being huffy and starts to look at “his map of the Channel” with VW and Vanessa (“Nessa”):

Let me see, I [VW] said. And then he was interested, & showed me the currents, & I saw the wrecks of ships; & he told me that the very deep channel in the middle was the bed of an old river which had divided the land when England & France were joined. Then we smoothed our grievance.

Compare this to a passage from Between the Acts, a novel set just before WWII breaks out (England-France-Germany). Here, a small girl (who keeps forgetting her lines) kicks off the village pageant and its panorama of British history:

So it was the play then. Or was it the prologue?

Come hither for our festival (she continued)
This is a pageant, all may see
Drawn from our island history.
England am I . . .
[series of funny, slightly poignant audience interruptions and repetitions; girl needs prompting]
‘A child new born,’ Phyllis Jones continued,
Sprung from the sea
Whose billows blown by mighty storm
Cut off from France and Germany
This Isle.
. . .
Now weak and small
A child, as all may see.

VW writes the JB memoir in 1937 and conceives of the basis of BA in 1938. I think the relation between the two has something to do with VW’s implicit connection between looking at the map, the point of division between England and the Continent, and her assertion that she and JB “smoothed [their] grievance.” Not 100% sure yet what this means for BA aside from something general having to do with a very personal regard for history, the historical (geographical split and what follows, what the split engenders) as an allegory for the personal, or, in the case of the pageant, history and ontogenesis as parallel in some way—the small, weak child, orphaned of her parents, France and Germany?

I Just Love This Poem

2009-06-17T20:59:00.001-07:00

This poem was distributed in my Canonicity class some time ago, as an example of what is (as it turns out, a reasonably well-known) bad poem. We had to say if it was 'bad' or not and why.

In the right mood, I might cry to this. And then I might cry some more for being wretched enough at having been emotionally provoked by something so ludicrous. Is it wrong for me to take pleasure in this, both sincerely and for its comic value? “No”—I say. Plop, my mind goes.

Theophilus Marzials, “The Tragedy”*
From The Gallery of Pigeons (1874)

Death!
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop.
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop,
As they scraggle black on the thin grey sky,
Where the black cloud rack-hackles drizzle and fly
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop
On the black scrag piles, where the loose cords plop,
As the raw wind whines in the thin tree-top.
Plop, plop.
And scudding by
The boatmen call out hoy! and hey!
All is running water and sky,
And my head shrieks -- "Stop,"
And my heart shrieks -- "Die."

My thought is running out of my head;
My love is running out of my heart,
My soul runs after, and leaves me as dead,
For my life runs after to catch them -- and fled
They all are every one! -- and I stand, and start,
At the water that oozes up, plop and plop,
On the barges that flop
And dizzy me dead.
I might reel and drop.
Plop.
Dead.
And the shrill wind whines in the thin tree-top
Flop, plop.

A curse on him.
Ugh! yet I knew -- I knew --
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from beginning to end --
My Devil -- My "Friend"
I had trusted the whole of my living to!
Ugh; and I knew!
Ugh!
So what do I care,
And my head is empty as air --
I can do,
I can dare,
(Plop, plop
The barges flop
Drip drop.)
I can dare! I can dare!
And let myself all run away with my head
And stop.
Drop.
Dead.
Plop, flop.
Plop.

*Note: I couldn't quite preserve the spacing of the poem.

Medea Redux. I eat my children. Or not.

2009-06-10T22:20:00.000-07:00

I realized I didn’t even give the bare premise of Winnie and Wolf last post. So I’ll do it here and get back to WW afterwards: WW is written in the form of a memoir of the adoptive father of the lovechild of Winnifred Wagner, Wagner’s daughter-in-law and runner of the Bayreuth festival, and Hitler. The narrator works for the festival for most of his recorded life, admiring Winnie from afar and watching the rise of Hitler from something like a small boy at a party to a kind of glorified ascetic. That’s all you really need to know to understand what I’m going to say.

[I wrote the following last Sunday, along with the title of this post:]

Because I’m so happy I’ve decided to write a silly title to my post that really has nothing to with its content, except for maybe some sense of re-doing; part two or sequel to the last post; or something to do with (and I don’t know why I find myself relying on this word as a concept so much lately) emesis (undoing; undoing then redoing?). But who can think of re-doing when everything is sun and happiness outside!!!! What a lovely day. Chocolate, book-browsing, coffee, gardens, Kate Bush revisits, oooooh! Not to mention looking forward to watching adaptation of Passage to India. Also found addictive read—now halfway through the second book of The Raj Quartet (The Day of the Scorpion). After a period of semi-drab reading: Mansfield Park (which I nonetheless admire greatly), Winnie and Wolf (of course), plotless but intriguing Flaubert’s Parrot (which I suppose I should blog), critical book on T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (I’m sorry, I think Eliot is too clever for my taste). And meeting with old friends! Too much happiness and pleasure going around to be re-doing things. Also found a critical book just published this year by Cambridge UP called Virginia Woolf and the Victorians which should be interesting: I want to know more about what VW inherited, as opposed to (popular drum roll) rejected, in her parents’ generation.

But I really want to get Winnie and Wolf over-with, and I refuse to leave my commentary on it at what I said last post. It did occur to me, though, that I may be treating this blog too much as a place to blog books. I don’t want to be reviewing all the time, or acting as though I’m reviewing (because it’s so tempting to say one does or does not like something—vanity or a broadly defined concern for quality?), or writing responses. For instance, Andrew and I talk interesting things that I’d like to record on this blog. Today we talked about this silly comparison between two women made by a pro-life proponent; why so-called toilet-boil mentality (I don’t see it therefore it is not or my actions do not have consequences if I don’t see them) is not really something you can condemn on any logical grounds, if you are trying to find a logical way to prove morality or reasons for ethical behaviour, at least insofar as this applies to aborting a baby; will expand on this later. Andrew made an interesting point about literary value that would have been really useful to me in my Canonicity class that I’m sure arose at some point during the term but wasn’t articulated as well as he put it—about literature being a way of invoking scenarios, or (if not directly presenting a scenario) stimulating thought of a scenario, and the reader having to then imagine and understand the interplay of thought and feeling specific to the scenario—the particular problems and facets of it. Andrew said he thought one possible of way saying one piece of writing were more valuable than another would be by measuring each against its capacity to stimulate this kind of thought-discovery. I thought of my Canonicity instructor’s question: can one imagine a culture in which Shakespeare is not considered great? And I then thought of Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare saying Shakespeare was so ‘various,’ so explorative of different situations, as an alternate articulation of what Andrew was saying. I’m sure this was said in my Canonicity class. It was probably shot down by the instructor on some grounds (in the spirit of challenge, though, not correction—mucho importante).

So, back to Winnie and Wolf. Plod. Plod.

By question (posed at the end of my last post):

‘How much of the book’s faultiness is due to its potential as a sympathetic portrait of Hitler?'

[Zoom in to the present:]

11%. No, just joking. But I joke because, in retrospect, I think I’ve put out a bit of a loaded, unanswerable question. In fact, there is really no question of ‘how much’—and no question otherwise. The book simply seemed to me to appear more badly handled than it might otherwise appear because it was attempting something with so much fictional potential: the humanization of Hitler. It also seems a sort of delicate thing to attempt, especially through an unreliable narrator, and Wilson just goes clip-clop all over this terrain and its potentialities—there’s something so coarse-cut about the way these two things are handled, both individually and in relation to each other.

I also have to say, as a side note, that I hate it when books sigh all the time. You could summarize the novel as a lamentatious ode on the destructive and sublime nature of absolutist beliefs and people. But I sort of get frustrated whenever admiration is the mode of reflection. It’s something a bit different when it’s under question, which is what makes WW more interesting, from my pov. Take, for instance: “She wasn’t mad, Winnie—unless you think it is mad to live exclusively in a world of your own and to insist on life being understood exclusively on your terms” (360).

A passage related to the one above gives a sense of what annoys me about the tone Wilson uses with narrator (a tone which I’m not altogether sure we’re not meant to dissociate from Wilson himself):

I am unimaginative when meeting absolutism in other minds. I think, ‘You can’t really think that; you are telling yourself you think that because it is a system at present useful for your purposes’ . . . Apart from being patronizing, this attitude of mine is quite simply wrong. Absolutists do believe what they say they believe. How else can we account for their preparedness to die, and to kill, for their beliefs? (342)

This is one of those sticky passages where Wilson seems to be trying to say something deep but instead makes me feel whacked over the head with a ham, a perfumed ham . . . Let’s say that here the narrator is Wilson’s mouthpiece: how is the narrator/Wilson defining belief, and what of the circumstances in which so-called belief is generated? Okay, okay, we have examples of so-called absolutists throughout the novel, the circumstances in which they come to their beliefs, what these beliefs are. But somehow these examples seem quite disconnected from the narrator’s statements. Or is it my annoyance at the tone of these statements that prompts that disconnection, for me? The tone really does make me think of something some annoying, hot-headed, back-of-the-book reader student would say in class (which is not to say I have not at one time or another been that student).

Again, going back to the narrator, I’m a bit confused about what we’re supposed to think about ‘German pride’ in the book. (Third question: ‘What is “German pride” and why does Wilson seem so gung-ho about it?’) Wilson is talking about some kind of old German pride—having to do with Protestant villages, cleanliness, etc. Not Hitler’s German pride. The narrator talks about it quite a bit. But how is the reader meant to relate to it? Ironically, sympathetically? Perhaps the whole key of WW is this unsureness of how to regard things like German pride and hero-worship—both being kinds of beliefs. At the same time, German pride is never really tested and questioned in the same way hero-worship is. The narrator gets really earnest when talking about German pride, and there’s nothing to point to his feelings or observations being in any way misguided, misplaced, or wrong. Add to that the fact that he is our way of seeing into the past (before the Nazis and during) and into a particular culture, and I begin to wonder if we’re meant to take this pride stuff at face value, as purely descriptive of people in a time and place.

Second question: ‘Can art avoid being political?’

Throughout the novel we are reminded that Wagner is being interpreted by the Nazis for political and patriotic messages and that he never intended such messages. On the one hand, WW seems to be saying political interpretations of art are inevitable. On the other, it sort of mocks this tendency to interpret. And, strangely, if we are to sympathize with Hitler, we have to sympathize with the possibility of a world in which such interpretations do not exist. So, Hitler dreams of

a setting for the greatest music ever composed, which would transport the collective unconsciousness of one audience after the next in that packed opera house into the world of their true selves—not their world of petty debt or tedious work or party politics, but the true world of the spirit and the imagination. (254)

Knowledge of Schopenhauer would have been useful here; not knowing Schopenhauer I'm afraid of misunderstanding this passage. Still, the “true world of the spirit and the imagination” is, I think, simply a rephrasing of “a world of your own [in which] life [is] understood exclusively on your terms” (360). It poses the same problem: sympathize or criticize (with the understanding that accepting political interpretations of a piece of art does not mean one endorses, for instance, what one interprets as a Nazi message)?

Fourth question: ‘is Wilson just trying to write a pretty history-book?'

No. Yes. No.

Winnie and Wolf. Or, I Am Filled with Regret and Self-Reproach For Regret Upon Having Finished This Book.

2009-06-01T21:21:00.000-07:00

PS Proceed only if you wish not to read—Winnie and Wolf, that is.

31 May 2009

First off, let’s be fair and acknowledge some things: 1) I was attracted by the book’s cover and decided to read it on the basis of this and of having read the author’s The Victorians. 2) My reading started off somewhat sceptical though optimistic because I had been reading this review by Terry Eagleton (note to self: big names do not mean trustworthy half-hearted recommendations). 3) Of Wagner I only know a handful of motifs, and I don’t know anything (really) about Nietszche, Schopenhauer, or anything about the ego in 19^th c German philosophy—this kind of book might have been more meaningful to me if I’d had some deep knowledge of these things. 4) I’ve been reading this book painfully slowly over a period of months (finishing other books on the side) and willing myself to finish it. I began to tell myself that I was reading it in order to write on it—to blog it—and so the blogging of it became my holy grail, to the extent that I developed a bit of a fear of blogging it after finishing it and began to procrastinate on blogging the book, as I had on finishing the book. So now I’m blogging it. I’m striking into the demon’s heart—if this were an age of paper, or an age of quills, I would say ‘with my pen,’ but no—I’m encoding the demon’s heart (is that a good thing, suppression? —I don’t understand this about movies that rejoice when a demon or villain has been bound and locked away—it’s only temporary—why is everyone celebrating? Aren’t they worried the demon will come back again? They should be working, straightaway, on how to destroy the villain. Or would a psychologist say this is unhealthy—that it’s necessary for one’s demons to have their allotted space, allotted boundaries, and that to conquer them is really to accept them?). But what can one say about Winnie and Wolf? As much as one can say about one’s parents, or any kind of persistent element in one’s life that isn’t particularly pleasant, but not altogether bad, either.

1 June 2009

Most of the time reading this book I was confused. Also sometimes frustrated, because confused: I couldn’t figure out the author’s intention. It was really difficult to say if/where Wilson was using his narrator as a mouthpiece and where he was using him as simply provocative, or unreliable. An author could, of course, do all three, but I think the problem with Wilson’s narrator is that most of the time he appears reliable (indeed, Eagleton’s review takes the narrator for Wilson), so that when some attention is drawn to the possibility of some distance between himself and Wilson in contexts which don’t appear more thematically significant than others, things just get confusing. My sense of Wilson’s handling of the narrator is, I think, a converse articulation of what I feel is the novel as a thematic quicksand. That is, there are some really interesting ideas in WW, but it seems that Wilson lays emphasis too wide across this set of ideas; or, those structural features that might make distinctions as to emphasis are either absent or have a sense of being absent or shallow about them.

Wilson perhaps covertly acknowledges his novel as nothing more than an artistic attempt when Hitler/Wolf tells the narrator “‘When you are older, you will understand that Parsifal is [Wagner’s] masterpiece.’” And the narrator thinks of Parsifal,

it is an incoherent masterpiece, which touches dark places in an unintended way . . . it is an imperfect work of art. But I never made the transition Wolf predicted. I have never considered it a more interesting or more impressive thing than The Ring. (290)

The narrator never makes “the transition” because to do so would be some breach of ethics in which (I’m guessing) Wolf’s hero-worship values would become validated/would validate the aesthetic worth (“masterpiece”) of a piece of art. If the narrator (and not Wilson) is himself writing an incoherent but nonetheless in some way admirable manuscript, then I suppose his inability to exalt the incoherent piece of art over The Ring cycle is a sign that he is capable of recognizing what his MS should be, what his life story should be. Perhaps Wilson is saying the same of his book? (Alright, alright, disclaimer here: this post is incoherent and in no way pretends to the virtues it finds lacking in said book.)

BREAKTIME:

For 2 June 2009, after work.

Questions for tomorrow’s emetic sesssions: How much of the book’s faultiness is due to its potential as a sympathetic portrait of Hitler? Can art avoid being political? What is ‘German pride’ and why does Wilson seem so gung-ho about it? And, is Wilson just trying to write a pretty history-book?

To the Canonization of my Cat: The Entrails of my Reading of Aurora Leigh

2009-05-11T19:09:00.000-07:00

Warning: this post is going to be a bit hodge-podgey and bird-brained. And, if you ever plan on reading Aurora Leigh and don’t want to know what happens, don’t read this post.

My cat has to be put down. She is very sweet, docile—though still intelligent, I think—and very, very sick. The vet thinks it is something viral (feline leukemia or AIDS, probably), which is to say whatever she has, it isn’t curable. Treatment can only be supportive. She is only five years old; she weighs 5.2 lbs (down from 6 lbs at the time of her last vet visit). So I’ve been thinking today about death in perhaps a more real, pragmatic way than I usually think of it: I’ve been thinking about what steps should be taken with my cat (do we diagnose or put her down straightaway?—it’s $500 to diagnose, $600 to get her teeth out, and the vet practically told us she should be put down anyway); how much now I want to know about the workings of human and animal bodies; the things I want to do before I die, and how I want to treat my cat before she dies. It’s perhaps a little dramatic to get so worked up over a cat, but she is a really lovely cat with a lovely face and lovely temperament. In any case, the sum of my thinking in what I’ve called a ‘pragmatic’ way about death is really the idea of action and a basis for action when faced with these things. So I’ve been thinking (and this is an illogical leap): I’m going to start a biography of Katherine Mansfield. (She played cello, you know.)

On a somewhat related note (and as somewhat indicated by my last post), I’ve been thinking a lot about how one might talk about the body in various authors and pieces of literature. As I told someone back in March, I’ve begun to think that ‘everything is rooted in the body.’ What I meant by that may seem untrue to some, overemphasized to others, and perhaps completely obvious to some others: so many things I’ve been encountering in literary criticism and literature refer to the limits of the human body, our perceptions of the body, and the analogies between the processes and boundaries of body and mind.

All this as a quasi-related work-up to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (why does AL always get these lengthy preambles—always being twice, including this time)?* There is a lot about the importance of “‘stand[ing] on the earth’” in AL (9.854). Marian’s rape and the resultant illegitimate child are the means by which Aurora must learn to stop elevating or idealizing her poetic task and the task of caring for the souls of others as somehow above or detached from the body, the claims of being a woman (socially, biologically), and something else to do with the earthly that I haven’t really been able to define. We talked a bit about Aurora ‘learning’ from Marian in my Brownings course, but I’m sort of struggling to piece together the specific instances in which Aurora has rejected the so-called earthly and perhaps even abject claims embodied by Marian. There is the scene in which Aurora learns of Marian’s rape, which may simply be the key instance of such a rejection; one could also interpret the description of the poor in Book 4 as some kind of coagulate mass as a picture of the abject; there is also Aurora’s resistance to her love for Romney, which could be a rejection of her role as a woman in a romantic relationship as much as an indicator of her maturity. I think it’s just one of those things where I’ve sympathized too much with the protagonist and forgotten what are related specifics brought out in the heated debate I discussed in this post.

Nonetheless, there are a couple of passages in AL I’m thinking of that demonstrate the poem’s ideal awareness of soul and physical and social reality. The following passage also fits in with the idea of an awareness of womanhood and the body as part of Aurora’s personal and poetic development. Having returned to Italy, Aurora sees some women praying to the Madonna and she describes each in terms of “a tale/To fit [her] fortunes” (7.1229-30) (perhaps significantly, she fictionalizes or recognizes (which is it?) woman with her poet’s imagination)—a humpback woman whose mother is supposed to have just died, a lovesick young woman, and a very very old woman. The scene described is, I think, meant to echo the prayer procession in which Aurora’s father first spots and falls in love with Aurora’s mother, a figure that haunts the poem. The old woman in Aurora’s prayer picture

fret[s] on

Against the sinful world which goes its rounds

In marrying and being married, just the same

As when ‘twas almost good and had the right,

(Her Gian alive, and she herself eighteen).

‘And yet, now even, if Madonna willed,

She’d win a tern in Thursday’s lottery

And better all things. Did she dream for nought,

That, boiling cabbage for the fast-day’s soup,

It smelled like blessed entrails?’ (7.1242-51)

The most striking thing about this passage is the metaphor EBB is working with in the last two lines, and how this adds something semi-mystical to the emphasis on some necessary acknowledgement of the world and the earthly (‘And yet, now even . . .’). The footnote to these lines in our Norton edition says, “Numerous legends of saints include as evidence of the sanctity of the holy life the fact that, after death, their entrails smelled so deliciously and did not rot, as is the way with normal people” (250 n2). Isn’t that strange? Stranger still is how EBB extrapolates from this the notion of saintliness and spirituality as a matter of the body, furthermore suggesting that saints’ parts are edible and possibly delicious-smelling! --Although there is the Eucharist (the sacrifice of Christ turns up everywhere AL), and this might be connected to the eating of saints, no blasphemy or weirdness WHATSOEVER.

The other thing I notice about this passage is a relished detailing of the so-called earthly (the old woman, her preoccupations, her soup) that echoes parts of Robert Browning’s painter poem “Fra Lippo Lippi”; there is a similar kind of earthly-spiritual ideal going on in RB’s poetry and in “Fra Lippo” in particular (though I don’t know enough about EBB and RB to say how similar). Like Aurora, Fra Lippo “dr[a]ws” what he sees:

folk at church,

From good old gossips waiting to confess

Their cribs of barrel-droppings, candle-ends—

To the breathless fellow at the altar-foot,

Fresh from murder, safe and sitting there

. . .

Signing himself . . . because of Christ

(Whose sad face on the cross sees only this

After the passion of a thousand years)

Till some poor girl, her apron o’er her head,

(Which the intense eyes looked through) came at eve

On tiptoe, said a word, dropped in a loaf,

Her pair of earrings and a bunch of flowers

(The brute took growling), prayed, and so was gone.

I painted all. (146-63)

(I know one classmate from my Brownings class wrote on John Donne and the Brownings, and I would think all this sense/soul stuff and the contradictions it gets into would be a starting point for the comparison.)

The second passage of AL I had in mind, particularly in thinking on Aurora and the abject, has another of those strange metaphors, and relates to a class discussion on “A Musical Instrument” referred to in this post. Here, Aurora figures herself as Io. The footnote reads that in one version of the myth of Zeus/Jove and Io, Zeus makes Io into a cow that must perpetually be ushered on wandering by a gnat/gadfly, to be at some point released from her form “on the banks of the Nile” (239 n1).

Truth, so far, in my book! A truth which draws

From all things upward. I, Aurora, still

Have felt it hound me through the wastes of life

As Jove did Io; and, until that Hand

Shall overtake me wholly and on my head

Lay down its large unfluctuating peace,

The feverish gad-fly pricks me up and down. (7.826-833)

When I think of Zeus and metamorphoses I think of Leda and Zeus as the swan, or Syrinx turned into a reed, pursued by Pan—I think of rape. But Io’s is not a story of rape; she’s just a mistress of Zeus, hidden from the wife, which perhaps makes EBB’s metaphor all the more interesting. What is a mistress? A woman defined by her sex, no power in the way a wife and mother might have power, though this, I realize, is quite a narrow definition perhaps only suitable to thinking about Aurora. What I mean by that is, there is a rape in AL, and it’s Marian whose raped—Aurora isn’t raped, and yet somehow she must benefit from an understanding of Marian’s experience: if Aurora’s Jove is “Truth,” then she has some kind of sensualised union with it that is somehow one degree removed from and yet analogous to the situation of rape experienced by Marian and associated with, for instance, Syrinx, the muse and means of poetry. Marian’s rape and child become the means of exalting Marian as a Mary figure, the rape rewritten as some immaculate conception, just as Io’s relation to Jove as mistress can be converted to the relationship between the (woman) poet and “Truth.”

At the same time, saying that EBB is (only?) using Io as a mistress figure in this passage could be taking the hard way out. There is rape ready in it: the image of “that Hand” that will “overtake [Aurora] wholly” is an ambiguous one, suggesting the possession of the body in rape and the possession of insight and inspiration. Though I think the mistress interpretation might still stand if supported with other evidence from the poem.

Well, enough of this see-saw. Bless my cat.

I’m reading a couple of things I’ll blog later—A. N. Wilson’s Winnie and Wolf (which is my daily gruel) and Gabrielle McIntire’s super-recent Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

*Correction to my last post on AL: AL is a poem, or a kind of novelized poem, not a verse novel.

Woolf and the Body

2009-04-10T08:44:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking lately about Woolf and the body. Woolf is always thought of as being incredibly cerebral—which, no doubt, she was—but always to the point that I think there must be a popular misconception that she somehow rejects the body, does not think it important or take it seriously, just as there is the popular conception that she is somehow of a parcel with figures like T. S. Eliot, or how she must always and only be egotistical, when, really, she has one of the most sympathetic eyes ever.

Thinking about this I am of course reminded of a frequently cited passage in On Being Ill, on the body as a pane of glass:

[L]iterature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes.

It just occurred to me as I lay in bed this morning, procrastinating on my papers (actually, not wanting to face the world), that Woolf’s frequent use of metaphors of glass is connected to this. Why is it sometimes that these very obvious things take so long to process or register? I remember thinking when I first began reading Woolf how much she talked about glass; this thought was confirmed by Hermione Lee saying in her biography of Woolf that Woolf sustained a fascination for glass her whole life.

Here are some examples of glass in Woolf’s work that I think accord with the above passage:

· Near the opening of Orlando, when we are getting our semi-satirical introductory portrait of him (how straight or rather how complex do we read Woolf when she says that O’s face “was lit solely by the sun itself”?):

Hi His fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads. Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic leopard. When he put his hand on the windowsill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly’s wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well-set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light, Orlando’s face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun itself.

· From The Waves (alright, there are way way way too many references to glass here to record—which makes sense since this novel is all-out preoccupied with the self—so here’s a random sample):

The pigeon rose. I jumped up and ran after the words that trailed like the dangling string from an air ball, up and up, from branch to branch escaping. Then like a cracked bowl the fixity of my morning broke, and putting down the bag of flour I thought, Life stands round me like a glass round the imprisoned reed.

(I think one of the possible referents for the reed here may be Syrinx, the nymph Pan pursues, because the speaker is Bernard, the artist/writer figure. The story goes: Syrinx turns into a reed, and Pan, not knowing which reed she is, chops off a few them and makes his reed pipe which he then plays. Syrinx becomes an instrument (the implications of which we recently explored in my Brownings class, on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Musical Instrument”). This reed analogy makes Woolf’s metaphor all the more complex—a reed trapped inside a glass? Vessel inside vessel?)

· The famous dinner-cum-work-of-art in To the Lighthouse (and this interacts interestingly with the quotation of Orlando—the relation of light and glass becomes an interesting question that probably also has to do with the relation of the self to artistic inspiration and works):

Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily.

One should remember, too, how Woolf might connect glass with mirrors or the looking-glass; mirrors also appear everywhere in her work, though mostly as they do in other authors’ works, as vehicles for musing on self-construction.

Another thing that struck me as I lay in bed was that Robert Frost uses glass in “After Apple-Picking” as Woolf does in On Being Ill. Not that this is such a great coincidence or that Woolf is the only author who’s ever thought up the metaphor.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

Next time: Scenes from Hell in Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book.

Aurora Leigh

2009-03-04T17:16:00.000-08:00

Before I talk about Aurora Leigh, here’s the second paragraph of Woolf’s essay “Aurora Leigh” (read aloud in my Brownings class yesterday, said to be FAMOUS). Keep in mind that Woolf is writing from the literary perspective of 1932.

. . . fate has not been kind to Mrs. Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her place. One has only to compare her reputation with Christina Rossetti’s to trace her decline. Christina Rossetti mounts irresistibly to the first place among English women poets. Elizabeth, so much more loudly applauded during her lifetime, falls farther and farther behind. The primers dismiss her with contumely. Her importance, they say, “has now become merely historical. Neither education nor association with her husband ever succeeded in teaching her the value of words and a sense of form.” In short, the only place in the mansion of literature that is assigned her is downstairs in the servants’ quarters, where, in company with Mrs. Hemans, Eliza Cook, Jean Ingelow, Alexander Smith, Edwin Arnold, and Robert Montgomery, she bangs the crockery about and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point of her knife.

Bangs the crockery! I can only picture EBB with her long dark hair and some cumbersome black gown heavily shifting her way through a narrow passage between kitchen tables in a dark old kitchen taking pans—I know, VW says crockery—and hitting the sides of the tables with the dullness of church bells or dinner calls and maybe also grunting! And the peas!

This does remind me of a passage in Orlando where an unnamed writer who will never be named but is simply known to be Shakespeare writes in Orlando’s estate kitchen.

So let’s be serious.

This week in my Brownings seminar we’re reading EBB’s verse-novel Aurora Leigh, something with which EBB wanted to “touch this everyday life of our age” (this in a letter we’ve looked at in the back of our Norton edition, written to Mary Mitford on 30 December 1844). So, along with references to the Industrial Revolution and other modernizations of poetic subject matter, EBB addresses the Woman Question and the Socialist Question—titles, our professor has told us, that are respectively used to refer to Victorian debates surrounding women’s rights or the growing class divide and poverty in industrial England. Romney, Aurora’s cousin, speaks for a kind of approach to social discontent and poverty that is, as a class member pointed out, very much in the vein of how we think of utilitarianism (though this is anachronistic, we were told; utilitarianism came after the publication of AL and EBB is thinking more specifically of Continental social theorists such as Charles François-Marie Fourier). In a very interesting way, in Book II EBB has Aurora address Romney’s social zealotry and her struggle to be taken seriously as a woman writing through the Romantic idea of the individual: finding the universal in individual things, as Romantic poets do, means rejecting what are labelled as mathematical mass-scale social solutions, solutions which ignore the importance of sympathetic individual connections or specific circumstances in helping others. As for the Woman Question, the Romantic Individual is taken up as a model for the fulfillment of the individual’s abilities and aspirations, regardless of sex; in refusing her cousin’s marriage proposal, Aurora answers

Whoever says

To a loyal woman, ‘Love and work with me,’

Will get fair answers if work and love,

Being good themselves, are good for her—the best

She was born for. (2.439-43)

Anyhoo, this is all by way of leading up to what this post is really going to consist of (because it hasn't begun yet), my response on AL. I'm posting the response because I haven’t been reading or thinking much about books that aren’t class-assigned. And because the response is very much like something I would write here. Though a little warning if you proceed: the response sounds somewhat confused in the paragraph about spaces. My meaning can be worked out if you put in a little more effort that you should have to; I was writing at 5 in the morning.

. . . I stooped

And lifted the soiled garland from the earth,

And set it on my head as bitterly

As when the Spanish monarch crowned the bones

Of his dead love. (Aurora Leigh 2.808-12)

Aurora crowns herself twice in Book II of Aurora Leigh. After the first crowning, Aurora’s poetic ambitions are insulted by Romney, and her aunt casts Romney’s proposal and Aurora’s refusal in less lofty light than either did; Romney proposes out of a concern for Aurora’s material well-being and Aurora is no more than a contrary girl who resists her feelings (see 2.685-91). Romney’s rival for Aurora, Aurora’s poetry, is not transcendent and eternal, but rather made transient, and low: Aurora’s aunt imagines Aurora wanting flirtatious “running knots in eyebrows” (2.663), echoing metaphors of immature poetry—“Many . . . /Hav[ing] strung their losses on a rhyming thread,/As children, cowslips” (1.946)—or else frivolous occupation—“I [Aurora] would . . . dance/At fairs on tight-rope” (2.253-4). Upon crowning herself a second time, Aurora’s lofty poetic crown has been dragged through the earthly, the silly, the material, and is “soiled” by “the earth” on which it fell.

The difference between the earthly and the transcendent—or rather, the way in which they are brought to bear on one another—is a central theme surrounding the usefulness or relevance of poetry as a vocation, and is the basis of Romney’s and Aurora’s debate in Book II. The time that elapses between Aurora’s first self-crowning and her second is, I think, related to the space in which earthly and transcendent intermingle. Aurora addresses this space elsewhere as the province of the poet: “the artist keep[s] up open roads/Betwixt the seen and unseen” (2.468-9). There is something unbearable about the lack of such of a space, a scenario in which “every heart-beat” can be set “down there in [a] bill” (2.788). And Aurora’s alienation from Romney is pictured as a space between “divided rocks” (2.1246); it is an unnatural space that forbids communication between Aurora’s lofty ambitions and Romney’s earthly “missionariness” (1.435), “bar[ring] . . . mutual sight and touch” (2.1247).

I think it’s possible to take the crownings in Book II, and what elapses between them, as a microcosm of the novel. In the time that elapses between one crowning and the next—between one stage of maturity and another—Aurora is exposed to that space in which the earthly and the transcendent are made to interact or are otherwise each shown to be insufficient when taken alone. So, leading up to the second crowning, Romney proposes that Aurora “come down” and touch individuals among the multitude of earthly suffering, saying she’ll come to find in “every woman” her “mother’s face” (2.385, 2.390): it’s difficult to distinguish Romney’s vision from his accusation that Aurora’s lofty, individualistic poetry finds “A whole life at each wound” (2.187). It’s also difficult to reconcile Aurora’s rounded poetic vision, in which “men plant tulips upon dunghills” (2.286), with her grief for her father, up in Heaven, where she imagines “Not even [her] father[ ] look[s] from work or play” to see who “‘cries’” below—Aurora (2.740-1).

The interpretation of the spaces and crownings as elements of a bildungsroman, or a küntslerroman, can be loosely linked to a basic analysis of Aurora’s metaphor of the “Spanish monarch” (2.211). If Aurora is both the subject and object of her self-crowning, then is she the “Spanish monarch” or “his dead love” (2.212)? Can she be both? And, if so, what part of her is to die, and what to live on to crown that dead self? This crowning can be compared to Aurora’s writing of her life, a task which also demarcates between selves, as early on Aurora claims to write for her “better [older] self” (1.4).

At the same time, I think the self-crowning metaphor is perhaps more rich in interpretations than what I’ve suggested. I think it may be connected to anxieties Aurora has about assimilation and agency—whether it is she or the poets who speak through her poetry (1.890-4). And it is in some way informed by the wonder that precedes and blinds “Analysis,” in which “Being acted on and acting seem the same” (1.968). These passages raise questions of agency that can be seen to feed back into Romney and Aurora’s debate through the opposition between individualistic transcendence and the social interdependence of the earthly state. But I think there’s more to be thought about when it comes to the relationship of “Analysis” to the crowning metaphor—whether the individual figuration of the Spanish king and his dead love signals an analytical separation of subject and object. Or if, in Book II, Aurora still contains herself through her self-crowning within that wonder of poetry that “know[s]not if the forests move or we” (1.970).

Ultimately, what I’m getting at through the crowning metaphor is perhaps simply a version of the question of what kind of perspective—on one’s agency, principles, and vocation—Aurora gets in writing on herself.

Some More Thoughts on The Biographer’s Tale

2009-02-17T18:45:00.000-08:00

I didn’t make clear in my last post (on Biographer’s Tale) that Phineas is a Ph.D. student in English who quits his degree to write the biography; literary interpretation is the backdrop of this novel. It struck me tonight that, as I was reading the novel, I had a distinct sense that, aside from the humourous pokes at literary critical models (most notably psychoanalysis), the novel’s mass scheme of analogy was making me conscious of, celebrating, and perhaps even slightly mocking my desire to draw analogy and thus find meaning—to impose literary interpretation on “‘disparate texts’”*. It was an odd mix of feelings, as I remember it now: I was conscious of doing something I had learned—as Phineas learned to do, so far from his ‘simple’ pleasure in Lord of the Rings. I was doing something that felt almost delusional, given the infinite extension of the resemblances being presented; there were different kinds of resemblances occurring, and connections occurring between those. I was sort of mystically elated, both by the connections, and by a sensation of delirium, of being carried along; I felt delirious when I didn’t feel as though I were doing something wrong and nonsensical, when I didn’t feel delusional! And, in contrast to feeling I was doing something I had learned, something constructed, you might say, I also felt I was doing something that was at times very effortless or ‘natural’—which, I think, feeds into the sense of elation and delirium.

I’m sure Byatt intends all this querying of how we construct meaning. In the process, she’s pointing to how we assimilate—but perhaps doubt—those things we’ve been exposed to and how they influence our receptions or readings of things: if I had a knowledge of taxonomy, or Ibsen’s life, etc., I might have been able to draw more connections than I did. Because I’m a student of literature, I got *some* of the literary references, constructed some connections around those, and was perhaps more receptive to the novel as a comment on the act of literary interpretation and its associations. It’s possible that Byatt takes an angle on education and assimilated knowledge. For instance, literary interpretation in the novel is inevitably associated with literary criticism—to what extent, I’m not sure—and literary criticism is, in turn, associated with Phineas’s lack of confidence, and is juxtaposed with a validation of his adolescent, naive enchantment with Tolkien. Reading the novel as a bildungsroman, a novel of development, Phineas’s movement into sexual relationships and self-confidence is perhaps a complex fictional working-out of the idea of literary pleasure—what kind of pleasure has traditionally been allowed in literary criticism, what has been denied, what the rules of inclusion ‘should be.’

The other interesting thing about taking BT as a comment on literary interpretation is thinking on how it draws forth interpretation and what this has to say about the idea of literature: this novel can seem sometimes just a series of facts, of documents, things you might pick up in the non-fiction section of your library. And yet, given the narrative frame that surrounds these, the documents come to life and become ‘thematically unified’—they become the elements of a fictional text. This reminds me of a statement Woolf made on biography, saying (and I paraphrase) that biography is the only true fiction. Her comment is linked to ideas of the novel and biography as narratives that concentrate on individual lives. But I think it can be applied in a more diffuse sense to what Byatt shows us in BT: I think there’s some real interest in facts and how they are represented inherent in interest in literature. I’m reminded here of something my Victorian Lit. Professor said to my class, applying Thomas Carlyle to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and that is the idea that events have a “density” to them: in BT, a fact or a document has different aspects to it that connect to aspects of other facts or documents—it has dimension and density. On top of that, there’s the voice in which the fact or document is communicated, and how that affects what connections we make.

As a minor note, all of this self-conscious literary interpretation makes me think of a Nabokov story called “Signs and Symbols.” I’ll quote an essential bit here as a taste; you might notice the interesting, permutative, and perhaps darkly humorous reference to pathetic fallacy (descriptions of weather, landscape, etc. that reflect a protagonist’s state of mind). This passage features the deranged (unnamed?) son:

The system of his delusions had been the subject of a paper in scientific monthly . . . “Referential Mania,” Herman Brink had called it. In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy—because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. (599; The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Vintage International , 1997)

*See my quotation of this in the previous post for context.

Biography Cosmography

2009-02-06T21:17:00.000-08:00

I’ve just finished A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale (Chatto & Windus, 2000): I will say, because it occurred to me so solidly as I was two-thirds of the way through the novel, that I give it 88%. I don’t mean to assign the book a grade by way of reviewing it for whoever reads this post. Rather, I think the percentage reflects my sense of the novel as wholly conceived in a sometimes deeply satisfying way, and yet as also marked by eccentricities and gaps that almost irritated me. I understand the novel is intended to be in some measure fantasy, particularly in the context of the surreal quality of the novel’s dominant theme of seemingly infinite analogy (between people, facts, fiction). But at times elements of this fantasy veered into a too-pointed whimsicality. Or else into a literary self-referentiality that sometimes came off as self-reference for its own sake. The self-referential, self-critical passages play into a number of thematic lines: the novel’s pokes at literary theory; the analogy between the world of the reader and that of Phineas, the first-person narrator; the presence of multiple voices in the text, and in Phineas, as well; Phineas’s insecurity and self-consciousness, and his consciousness of these things as he makes his way to some happier, more comfortable state; Phineas’s (eventual) consciousness of writing his life, figuring BT as (fictional) shadow autobiography; the role of self-awareness in modifying statements, in gesturing toward the “precision” something like biography tries to get at (“precision” being an “ideologically unloaded idea” Phineas uses—drawing from his spiritually impoverished critical inheritance—“to avoid the problem of the decay of belief in the idea of objectivity” (250)). That’s all I can think of right now (I know there is more, but I lost some of it while writing.) To re-route, à la BT, to my point about what I did not enjoy about this novel: the whimsicality and Phineas’s self-referential comments on what he writes (or narrates) sometimes result in preciousness.* I should, however, distinguish between self-reference in the novel and what are often beautiful self-aware moments of meta-commentary.

The cohesiveness of BT is often called forth by such statements. I say this meaning to invoke the novel’s sometimes mystical atmosphere, as well as the possible analogy biography bears to calling forth—as a stirring of all things connected to the biographical subject. This brings me to the book’s cosmic vision, something one of the characters summarizes as “dangerous”: “False analogy . . . and the desire to construct a theory of everything from received ideas close at hand” (156). The novel, as its epigraph, from Goethe’s Elective Affinities, suggests, becomes a dream-like series of suggestions of analogy after analogy. Linnaeus, Galton, and Ibsen become refractions of the elusive Scholes Destry-Scholes, the subject of Phineas’s attempt at biography—Phineas G. Nanson himself becoming Phineas “‘Nanson, son of Nanson,’” triads leaping out (248) (the novel’s characters can be divided into sets of two or three, depending on how you consider the relations between them). Phineas’s inadvertent self-(re)production in the act of attempting biography—of constructing another—mirrors that Phineas reads into Destry-Scholes. And all who research and write from the standpoint of the person in control, the person who surveys, composes, composites, the biographer, the eugenicist, the taxonomist, are themselves subsumed by another of their kind. There was something almost mesmeric about reading this novel; what began as challenging allusions to naturalist history gradually resolved into a grand poetic scheme of taxonomy and relations: Phineas lays facts and fictions beside one another, as Destry-Scholes once did, and it becomes impossible not to “find the same structures, the same velleities . . . in the most disparate texts” (144).

There are, of course, things I haven’t figured out about the novel, things I suspect may fall outside this scheme or that belong to secondary (?) themes. The Ibsen passages in the novel are particularly enigmatic. There are some lurking father/son and mother/son patterns and a pervert, Maurice Bossey, that serve more than as simply pokes at or allusions to psychoanalytic literary interpretation. Maurice Bossey may, I think, be some kind of anti-Phineas. (It can certainly be argued that he’s a kind of foil to Phineas. At the same time, in the multiplicitous spirit of the novel, it can also be argued that Maurice is a foil to Erik and Christophe, or to that mysterious satyr-like man Christophe sports with in the park). I’d also like to think more about the structure of the novel, with its first third or so fixed firmly on Destry-Scholes’s biography of Elmer Bole, another figure I suspect has a more complex significance than is immediately apparent.

But I should stop now. So I’ll just say that what intrigues me most about what I understand of BT in a more general way is how the novel opens up from being a series of statements on the nature of (writing) biography into being a somewhat mystical enquiry into the idea of order; it can be a very beautiful book.

*I cringe a bit at other things that contribute to the fantasial quality of the novel—marbles, affected menus (something from American Psycho, if that helps you to imagine what I mean), somewhat two-dimensional female characters, considering the amount of time spent on them.

Edith Wharton

2008-12-31T17:53:00.000-08:00

I’m still slogging through Hermione Lee’s eponymous biography of Edith Wharton (2007), having picked it up last May and returned to it sporadically up until . . .well, now. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a wonderfully written biography. But I do feel that, just as Lee’s portrait of Wharton is of someone who is in some ways “‘inaccessible’” to those who knew her (558; Vintage, 2008), so there is something inaccessible to the reader about Wharton. When reading Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf I didn’t have this problem of having to put down and return to the book: almost every page held something vulnerable and telling about Woolf, and part of me thinks this has to do with Woolf’s character itself as something fragile, erratic, and charming. Probably the difference between the two biographies also has to do with the materials available to Lee; Woolf has diaries and diaries to draw from, whereas with Wharton there are mostly letters (some of which, notably those written to Henry James, she had destroyed). But I can’t help feeling that, even with this issue of available materials and with the possible ways in which the biographer’s craft can enhance the reader’s interest in the subject, the attraction of the reader to the biography will depend on the attractiveness of the subject herself. (I realize my feelings toward Wharton in Lee’s biography may be mine only—may be subjective—but I do think there is something slightly uninviting about Wharton’s character, less inviting to being known than Woolf.) By contrast with this emphasis on the potential attractiveness of the biographical subject, up to now I’ve thought of biography as more like fiction-writing—as works measured not by the potential attractiveness of their subjects to readers, but by the craft of authors. I am weary, though, using this term ‘attractiveness’: I think I’m assuming that my reader interest in Wharton as a biographical subject coincides with my personal sense of her attractiveness as a personality. I’m not sure how to separate these two things; I wonder how they could be separated.

Large portions of Edith Wharton are dedicated to cataloguing gardens, architecture, and interior design that Wharton admired or such projects as she undertook. While these can sometimes be tedious to read, design was a big part of Wharton’s life and fiction. There are a few really interesting passages in which Lee describes the relation between Wharton’s passion for design and her character; these, in turn, speak to some of the central themes of Wharton’s works. Lee’s quotation of Daisy Chanler on Wharton’s renowned garden at Ste Claire in Hyères, France, makes some sense of Wharton’s gardening:

‘“What are you saying about my garden?” she [Wharton] seems to ask, and I hardly dare to say more. She could do it so much better herself, but I doubt if she would try to describe it. It would be telling something too intimate, for her garden is somehow an image of her spirit, of her inmost self. It shows her love of beauty, her imagination, her varied knowledge and masterly attention to detail; like her, it is somewhat inaccessible. Her garden is a symbol of the real Edith.’ (557-8)

Lee makes explicit Chanler’s latent comparison:

it might not be too fanciful to think that gardening and novel-writing have something in common. The mixture of disciplined structure and imaginative freedom, the reworking of traditions into a new idea, the ruthless elimination of dull, incongruous or surplus materials, and the creation of a dramatic narrative, all come to mind . . . John Hugh Smith reported to [Percy] Lubbock, in 1938, that ‘she told me that she thought her gardens were better than her books.’ (559)

The artistry of the garden—or of interior design, or architecture, for that matter—is similar to that of the novelist. Although I don’t know Wharton’s works well enough to say how widely Lee’s comparison applies to Wharton’s fiction, I am immediately reminded of House of Mirth (which I had to read for a course this last term, American Literature 1865-1914) and one of Wharton’s short stories, “Souls Belated” (1899). The big issue for the heroine of House of Mirth, Lily Bart, is, of course, that she cannot reconcile her desire to break free from the constraints of wealthy society with the opportunities for self-realization wealth allows her. Lily’s best self lies in her artistry, and this artistry finds expression in expensive objects and their design: “the setting she had pictured for herself” is

an apartment which should surpass the complicated luxury of her friends’ surroundings by the whole extent of that artistic sensibility which made her feel herself their superior; in which every tint and line should combine to enhance her beauty and give distinction to her leisure. (110; Penguin, 1986)

We cannot separate Lily from her social set and its physical surroundings. And Lily’s best audience, the person most equipped to appreciate her artistry, is Sim Rosedale, a Jewish magnate in social ascent. Somewhat similar to Lily in predicament, Lydia in “Souls Belated” doesn’t have the strength to leave her lover, Gannett, and the comfort they’ve achieved pretending to be a married couple in a kind of high society colony on the Mediterranean. Although it is not suggested that Lydia requires her social trappings for the same reasons Lily does, it is impossible for us and for Lydia to conceive of her outside the story’s particular social milieu. Lydia and Lily, then, embody something of the way in which Wharton insists on the relationship between self-realization and the social. Judging from Lee’s portrayal of the attitudes of Wharton and others to Wharton’s gardens and houses, Wharton’s own individual self-expression has strong thematic presence in (at least some of) her works.

Lee reveals much of Wharton that feels very personal, for instance, the intimate details surrounding her affair with Morton Fullerton. But it would seem that we are also supposed to get a strong sense of Wharton through the description of the gardens and houses she puts together and admires. Perhaps this (inevitable?) figuration of Wharton through what are essentially art objects—gardens, houses and their rooms—contributes to my feeling of her inaccessibility; perhaps Wharton in some way comes across as more like a series of objects than a person. Putting down Lee’s biography yet again I do feel as though I understand Wharton—I just don’t sympathize with her. This brings up questions of the aims of biography: whether these involve reader sympathy; to what degree reader sympathy can be differentiated from understanding the subject; and to what degree reader sympathy can be separated from reader interest, my measure in the first paragraph of this post. I think these questions are a re-articulation of my problem with using the word ‘attractiveness,' above, and may get at the heart of my issue with reading Edith Wharton.

On Being Ill, Attempt #2

2008-12-28T12:01:00.000-08:00

I found some brief quotations that will clear up what is meant by 'illness' in On Being Ill and in my last post, as well as how illness is connected to Woolf's idea of the poetic process. These are taken from Kate Flint's introduction to the 1992 Penguin edition of The Waves.

-"[T]he thought of death has the capacity . . . to remove distinctions between mental and physical sensations" (xxviii). Here, I think the "thought of death" is equivalent to the indifference to life Woolf describes in OBI. The loss of "distinction[ ] between mental and physical" is the state of illness Woolf describes--something with mental and physical symptoms that are indistinguishable from each other. This loss of distinction between seemingly distinct entities also has to do with Woolf's concept of identity and how the loss of self (depersonalization) is related to poetry and indifference to life.

-"Woolf makes analogies between the sense of one's body and the use of language. When one is most conscious of one's body's materiality, one is least likely to use words figuratively or speculatively" (xxx). So, when one is least conscious of one's materiality--one's physical body, when one senses its loss of distinctness from one's mental state, and from the physical bodies of others, one is in a liminal state of poetry. At the same time, Flint suggests that Woolf is conscious of the fact that, in order to give shape to such poetic liminality, one must assume a subjective position--one must insist on boundaries between oneself and others, even on boundaries within oneself. There is, then, a relationship between "creativity and possessiveneess" (xvii), of the kind of I spoke of below, in Orlando. Words can enter into the free play of poetry, rhythm, liminality, but in order for them to take on any communicable shape of thought or form they must inevitably reduce (they must choose a subject matter, then represent only one or a few aspects of it)--representation is always linked to reduction. I think this explains why the ill spring to life at the thought of "frost about their toes": they have to live, have to insist on breaking the liminal state of illness, in order to express.

-Flint says that in "The gestation of The Waves . . . [Woolf] documented her sense of its development and progress with the close, concerned attention of someone monitering a set of 'symptoms,' as she herself called them. 'I want to trace my own process,' she recorded" (xvii-xviii). The writing process is compared to illness, having symptoms; but this is just the process. In "A Sketch of the Past," Woolf talks about 'making things whole' through writing about them, about making sense out of traumatic experience through writing about it. I think perhaps the same can be said of illness and writing. The writing process is one in which things are brought to mind, like symbols, symptoms, particular markers of a painful memory. But the written product may be something more than this (it must be given shape, as I said above). So, I think illness is a state of fluid identity and therefore fluid thought--poetic imagination, and writing is something that comes out of this imagination. The Lady Waterford, sketching her husband, is engaging in something that comes out of rather than is constituted by "anarchy and newness."

On Being Ill: Ice Within and Without

2008-12-27T19:52:00.000-08:00

I’ve just finished reading Virginia Woolf’s essay On Being Ill (Paris Press, 2002), with an introduction by Hermione Lee (Oh I love her). I left the essay sort of confused—part of the intended effect, I think. I was trying to pinpoint exactly what Woolf was trying to say about the state of being ill. Illness is sometimes pain, and it has no existing language to express it (something Woolf says explicitly, early on). It is also a state that allows the privileged ill person to perceive something like the inexorable prehistory of Between the Acts (Woolf’s posthumously published novel). The latter state, for Woolf, seems to imply or accompany the ability of the ill person to find in words their “sensual[ ]” significance (22), their poetry, before and privileged above their grounding in meanings associated with reality and the healthy, the “army of the upright” (12).

Woolf’s notion of sympathy is connected with this army. I think Woolf is implying that sympathy is reducible to a tool of evolutionary self-preservation*: in encouraging the forging of social relations, it is linked to civilizing and productivity. Outside sympathy—or opposed to it—is the absoluteness of the metaphorical frozen landscape that abides before, during, and after all life, a landscape that is described as both within the ill person (a “snowfield” (12)) and recognized by the ill person as something that exists, absolutely, truly, outside the daily wash of so-called healthy normality. So there is an idea of things as they are, ultimately and absolutely; there is the state of illness, which allows one to recognize this; and then there is illness as it allows one to access in oneself a mirror of the above idea of things, that “virgin forest” in each of us (11).

The ending of the essay, centred around the Lady Waterford, makes of the Lady a type of ill person; she goes through the pain of the loss of her husband, for which there is no language, we are reminded. But Woolf’s presentation of the lady’s day-to-day life as a matter of (literally) sketching people from the margins suggests that women (throughout history, and in Woolf’s day) are metaphorically ill people, free to imagine and observe from outside the rush of life. The Lady sits, seemingly devoted to her Lord, sketching him in the private and figuratively exposed position of his head half-hidden in a soup bowl. Another potentially devoted picture of wifely contemplation gives us a glimpse of the lady’s internal snowfield, a thought to the world after life and death: “Off he would ride again, stately as a crusader, to hunt the fox, and she would wave to him and think each time, what if this should be his last?” (27-8). Woolf here elaborates on something she mentions earlier, that “in [women] the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness” (10); devotion lies side by side with the anarchy and snowfields of the ill (and, Woolf implies elsewhere, of the poets).

Woolf’s configuration of poetic imagination can seem sometimes almost nihilistic in its association with death, suicide, and things beyond death, evident in this work and in others. But I think it is ultimately oriented toward transformation rather than nihilism, toward the kinds of transformations that take place when imagination—the “anarchy” of the ill—has free range. I’m thinking here of the strange carnivalesque element in Orlando, motivated by the suspended flux of the period in which the Thames is frozen over (ice! Snow!), and correspondingly characterized by Orlando’s shifting figurations of Sasha as a fox, a pineapple, an emerald, etc.

Orlando thinks of Sasha as a fox, and pursues her—wishes to possess her—as the Lord Waterford goes to hunt his fox before he is killed. There is a tension here between the poet as some kind of hunter, someone who ‘captures,’ and the poet as someone who participates in an anarchy of symbolism (the fox, the pineapple, the emerald). In a similar and somehow related way, there’s a tension between Woolf’s imperative to live—to “wriggle”—and her idea that we live for a “Heaven” that can be produced only by the poets and the ill, those people of ice and indifference to life:

The cows are driven home to be milked. Men thatch the roof. The dogs bark. The rooks, rising in a net, fall in a net upon the elm trees. The wave of life flings itself out indefatigably. It is only the recumbent [the ill] who know what, after all, nature is at no pains to conceal—that she in the end will conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag ourselves about the fields; ice will lie thick upon the factory and engine; the sun will go out. Even so, when the whole earth is sheeted and slippery, some undulation, some irregularity of surface will mark the boundary of an ancient garden, and there, thrusting its head up undaunted in the starlight, the rose will flower, the crocus will burn.[**] But with the hook of life still in us we must wriggle. We cannot stiffen peaceably into glassy mounds. Even the recumbent spring up at the mere imagination of frost about the toes and stretch out to avail themselves of the universal hope—Heaven, Immortality. . . Heaven-making must be left to the imagination of the poets. (16-8)

My reading of this passage is, however, confused by "frost about the toes." Why do the ill spring to life at the thought of frost about their toes? Why do they want to live? This could all be cleared up, I think, by looking more closely at Woolf's concept of the artistic process. (For instance, frost might be at the root of the poetic process, but one must live in order to execute it . . . ). But I won't do that now.

*This statement on Woolf's idea of sympathy may itself be somewhat reductive, I think. But she does seem pretty down on sympathy in this essay.

**Flowers are elsewhere associated with nature’s indifference; the flower bursting through the ice is not the imperative to live I’m talking about.