Finished Vanity Fair tonight, which is why this post will be so short, me having stayed up late to do so and then slept in. Smashing ending all around, nearly one of the best endings I've ever read, except I can't help but feel Thackeray really caved by having Amelia write to Dobbin before Becky showed her George's letter - that awful, wonderful Becky! What a great character. A perfect mix of Scarlett O'Hara, with her lonely good points, her odd spots of pity for those obviously weaker than her, and Machiavelli's ideal prince.
Anyways, the letter was the only part of it that didn't ring true to me - I suppose it wouldn't have been appropriate to have angelic Amelia really, unignorably, practically in debt to devilish Becky, although she was obviously in her emotional debt as it stood . . . if I have a problem with big flabby Regency/Fat King George/Victorian monster novels, that's it - that there's a realism-damaging hesitation to make all those lovely anti-heroes agents of good in a practical, plotty way, a way that could possibly alienate the ladies reading at home, or make them keep the serials away from their young ones. I should like to know if Thackeray had been planning to have Amelia write Dobbin before or after Becky showed her the letter.
The fact is evil people are almost never unremittingly harmful and literature has to reflect that to keep its humanity. Despite a millenium of schisms the most Calvinist, Protesting of us European descendants is Catholic enough to have a bit of faith, unconcious or not, in the notion of one good deed - a useful penance - expiating hundreds of wickednesses (to paraphrase that lying, fornicating, bigamist Rochester, who even romantic little Charlotte Brontë had to put in his place through mutilation, amputation and blinding before Jane Eyre could be permitted to marry him).
Visualizzazione post con etichetta Brontës. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta Brontës. Mostra tutti i post
lunedì, luglio 20, 2009
domenica, luglio 19, 2009
Vanity Eyre
Croatia was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Mostly it was the company - two of the brightest women in my life and lots of talking and arguing - the Mitford sisters without the money or Hitler. But I'm not into talking about my people so instead I'll just say Croatia was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
How the sun shone! How the delightful little coves of beaches sparkled blue and turquoise! How the air baked! How the kayak instructor's damp skin glistened over healthy young muscles in the sun! And how sweet it was to have myself to myself, neither of my companions being the sort who hijacks other people and our holiday having been nominally billed as a writing retreat. . . the Cultural Apocalypse Novel didn't get written, and after about 10 minutes of trying to do it on the first day I realized I was being a knob; it's going to need months of devotion just to work out and nail down the narrative voice, and sadly it will need to wait for semi-retirement, or else it'll drive me crazy. But lots of smaller writing, lots of poetry. And lots of sleep. All three of us arrived there stressed out to the point of practically exposed nerves - I think all three of us left as new women, partly because of being somewhere so beautiful, partly because of each other, partly because we could take it fucking easy.
That having been said, I utterly ruined my last two nights of sleep by buying Vanity Fair when I went into Dubrovnik looking for a present for the F-word. I'd brought Dicken's Pictures of Italy and was utterly disappointed, and Paul Theroux's Pillar of Hercules, which I'd swallowed whole on the trip to London and Gatwick (certainly the worst travel book of his I've ever read - very superficial, far more self-obsessed than his better work, much more "I said . . . my eyes danced . . . I was scared" than any of the others), and got Vanity Fair on a whim, mostly because of how much Thackeray showed up in Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Vanity Fair definitely needs its own devoted post, and probably a great big one, and not today because I still have 100 pages or so to go.
And probably the impact of Jane Eyre on Vanity Fair needs its own devoted post too, or possibly an academic paper . . . surely there is such a paper, Charlotte Brontë dedicating Jane Eyre's second edition to Thackeray, who was partway through publishing Vanity Fair when it came out. But there might not be, because it's not apparent in a very obvious way - though it is. The thing is, Jane Eyre reads as though it's influenced by Vanity Fair, and not vice-versa, because Charlotte Brontë's great strengths weren't in satire, and Thackeray's definitely were. The facility of Thackeray's satire makes it almost hard to believe Jane Eyre was published first, as Jane Eyre certainly contains efforts at satire - and to me, they're the less successful parts of the book, that the author looks least comfortable with, that would be borrowed from elsewhere if anything was.
The charade scenes in each book, for example, are so similar, but Jane Eyre's charade is all about Jane geeking on the fucking unattainable hotness of Mr. Rochester, and Vanity Fair's charade is the rather gruelling presage of Rebecca gutting her husband while illustrating how she gives London society a collective boner. Unless you're into the romance of Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair's looks ten times better, because it's so much more effective as a cultural illustrator - unless you're getting swept up into Jane's hard-on for Rochester, Jane Eyre's looks derivative of the work that came after it. Luckily Charlotte Brontë was a stunningly competent romance writer, at least as far as Jane Eyre goes, so most of the audience that hasn't gotten alienated and stopped reading at that point has been swept up into Jane's big old hard-on.
Anyways. Back to work. Ew.
How the sun shone! How the delightful little coves of beaches sparkled blue and turquoise! How the air baked! How the kayak instructor's damp skin glistened over healthy young muscles in the sun! And how sweet it was to have myself to myself, neither of my companions being the sort who hijacks other people and our holiday having been nominally billed as a writing retreat. . . the Cultural Apocalypse Novel didn't get written, and after about 10 minutes of trying to do it on the first day I realized I was being a knob; it's going to need months of devotion just to work out and nail down the narrative voice, and sadly it will need to wait for semi-retirement, or else it'll drive me crazy. But lots of smaller writing, lots of poetry. And lots of sleep. All three of us arrived there stressed out to the point of practically exposed nerves - I think all three of us left as new women, partly because of being somewhere so beautiful, partly because of each other, partly because we could take it fucking easy.
That having been said, I utterly ruined my last two nights of sleep by buying Vanity Fair when I went into Dubrovnik looking for a present for the F-word. I'd brought Dicken's Pictures of Italy and was utterly disappointed, and Paul Theroux's Pillar of Hercules, which I'd swallowed whole on the trip to London and Gatwick (certainly the worst travel book of his I've ever read - very superficial, far more self-obsessed than his better work, much more "I said . . . my eyes danced . . . I was scared" than any of the others), and got Vanity Fair on a whim, mostly because of how much Thackeray showed up in Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Vanity Fair definitely needs its own devoted post, and probably a great big one, and not today because I still have 100 pages or so to go.
And probably the impact of Jane Eyre on Vanity Fair needs its own devoted post too, or possibly an academic paper . . . surely there is such a paper, Charlotte Brontë dedicating Jane Eyre's second edition to Thackeray, who was partway through publishing Vanity Fair when it came out. But there might not be, because it's not apparent in a very obvious way - though it is. The thing is, Jane Eyre reads as though it's influenced by Vanity Fair, and not vice-versa, because Charlotte Brontë's great strengths weren't in satire, and Thackeray's definitely were. The facility of Thackeray's satire makes it almost hard to believe Jane Eyre was published first, as Jane Eyre certainly contains efforts at satire - and to me, they're the less successful parts of the book, that the author looks least comfortable with, that would be borrowed from elsewhere if anything was.
The charade scenes in each book, for example, are so similar, but Jane Eyre's charade is all about Jane geeking on the fucking unattainable hotness of Mr. Rochester, and Vanity Fair's charade is the rather gruelling presage of Rebecca gutting her husband while illustrating how she gives London society a collective boner. Unless you're into the romance of Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair's looks ten times better, because it's so much more effective as a cultural illustrator - unless you're getting swept up into Jane's hard-on for Rochester, Jane Eyre's looks derivative of the work that came after it. Luckily Charlotte Brontë was a stunningly competent romance writer, at least as far as Jane Eyre goes, so most of the audience that hasn't gotten alienated and stopped reading at that point has been swept up into Jane's big old hard-on.
Anyways. Back to work. Ew.
lunedì, febbraio 23, 2009
Smashy smashy
The only big problem with The Life of Charlotte Brontë is that now I want to read Shirley instead of moving on with my life and reading more Eliot or Hardy or something. Oh well. I'm not much of a one for biographies, but Brontë had such a strange life, and Gaskell did a fair job of putting that life in some sort of social and cultural context. She did a better job of being all Gaskell-y as she wrote (effervescent, perspective, though with a tendency to force sainthood on her objects of affection), and she was clever enough to lean heavily on letters; not only as source material but, in places, as the bulk of the text.
What dwells on my mind and what's pushing me to read Shirley is a growing curiosity about the specific social context Brontë and her sisters lived in. One can get swept up in the melodrama of their blockbusters and forget the general melodrama of their times, just as when you hit an Austen book you can get swept up in these narrow, sparsely-populated worlds the women live in, where the Napoleonic wars beating around their island only make vague appearances through the changes in fortune of their men.
But their vague historical contexts were so exciting, not so much from a war-ish point of view as in the flux hitting a rhythm of life that was about a thousand years old . . . Again in Austen it's all left indirect in favour of the development of individual characters. Nicely done all the same through their relationships of course, as in Pride and Prejudice, where every minute division in the privileged classes is mapped out carefully for us - we understand living on Cheapside is something to sneer at, that Elizabeth Bennett can marry Darcy without raising eyebrows beyond those of his aunt, whilst Wickham could marry her sister after an elopement while it was absolutely out of the question to tolerate his suit of Darcy's sister. We get the feeling things have changed over time but again, it's narrow; confined to the privileged classes and its bastards, hangers-on, and orphans.
Now the Luddites . . . there's something else altogether, and something far bigger and more important than which independently wealthy person was allowed to marry which other independently wealthy person (seriously, in Austen, the worst that was going to happen to those women if they didn't score rich husbands was moving to a small cottage or living with cousins - we only get glimpses of those less fortunate, who risk the real poverty that the vast majority of Austen's contemporaries risked). Most of what I know of Luddites is through one single explanation of a single concept that has stuck in my brain - the 'Luddite Fallacy'. That's the idea that increased mechanization or increased production efficiency would mean lower rates of employment. It is a fallacy, the thinking goes, because increases in production efficiency won't lead to the loss of jobs; instead of getting rid of employees, industrial concerns will use ever more employees to produce ever more stuff.
And here we are, nearly two hundred years after mechanization: we can consider the 'Luddite Fallacy' fallacious (sounds dirty!), because if there's one thing we produce a lot of, it's stuff. Far too much stuff. The production of ever more stuff has not abated. We're drowning in stuff and the oceans we once thought infinite are choking with stuff and all of that stuff is produced by a staggering number of people working. That's another story.
Fine - but I think the 'Luddite Fallacy' is one of those half-truths that are worse than a lie. Think of England, poor, fucked up England, where all of my industrial contacts are trying to pull the plug because it's a mess. We see people having jobs, yes - but incredibly crap, incredibly tenuous unskilled jobs in parts of the service sector that are the first to feel the pain when consumers start to worry. We see the benefit of stuff in their professional lives, that great surfeit of stuff with which we're polluting the world: it provides the Inselaffen jobs by having them sell it, not manufacture it. And then we see the Luddite Fallacy isn't a fallacy, but a half-arsed equivocation by the people who use the term.
Sure, English people are employed (though dramatically less so these days), but one kind of employment is not another, and there's nothing more replaceable or sackable than your standard service worker. What would happen if all the sweatshops servicing retailers like the Gap somehow managed to find out where each other was, and hold a co-ordinated strike? Fucking chaos - and they'd get what they wanted. But what would happen if all the salespeople at the Gap went on strike? A bunch of salespeople would get fired and replaced by a bunch of 18 year olds who want staff discounts. Maybe for a couple of days the shirts wouldn't be as nicely folded. Oh noes.
So the question for me: was the mechanization process that began two hundred years ago the beginning of the slow castration of the unprivileged classes in Britain? One part of my brain says no, of course not, the mechanization process turned the unprivileged classes into the working class, and the working class became a political force, and functioned as such until its balls were cut off in the 1970's. Another part of my brain says yes, of course, because mechanization ended the need for artisanal, skilled labourers, which meant you could send the machines to a country full of desperate people who you could bully into dropping tariffs and environmental/labour standards. Of course you'd be a fool not to. But the upshot is I don't know which part of my brain is right, or if neither is right.
And I want to, I want to know far more about how all this happened, and why the country of my mothers - my country, I suppose, though I'm a second-class citizen - is such a shithole now. All of which brings me back to Shirley - I need to know how a thoughtful, gentle and dreadfully conventional woman (as the Life has shown Brontë to be) wrote about the Luddites - how she presented them to her huge fan base down south - how she reconciled the misery of the working class in the West Riding with her need for political and religious continuity. And once it gets personal enough for me, I'm wading into the Luddites.
What dwells on my mind and what's pushing me to read Shirley is a growing curiosity about the specific social context Brontë and her sisters lived in. One can get swept up in the melodrama of their blockbusters and forget the general melodrama of their times, just as when you hit an Austen book you can get swept up in these narrow, sparsely-populated worlds the women live in, where the Napoleonic wars beating around their island only make vague appearances through the changes in fortune of their men.
But their vague historical contexts were so exciting, not so much from a war-ish point of view as in the flux hitting a rhythm of life that was about a thousand years old . . . Again in Austen it's all left indirect in favour of the development of individual characters. Nicely done all the same through their relationships of course, as in Pride and Prejudice, where every minute division in the privileged classes is mapped out carefully for us - we understand living on Cheapside is something to sneer at, that Elizabeth Bennett can marry Darcy without raising eyebrows beyond those of his aunt, whilst Wickham could marry her sister after an elopement while it was absolutely out of the question to tolerate his suit of Darcy's sister. We get the feeling things have changed over time but again, it's narrow; confined to the privileged classes and its bastards, hangers-on, and orphans.
Now the Luddites . . . there's something else altogether, and something far bigger and more important than which independently wealthy person was allowed to marry which other independently wealthy person (seriously, in Austen, the worst that was going to happen to those women if they didn't score rich husbands was moving to a small cottage or living with cousins - we only get glimpses of those less fortunate, who risk the real poverty that the vast majority of Austen's contemporaries risked). Most of what I know of Luddites is through one single explanation of a single concept that has stuck in my brain - the 'Luddite Fallacy'. That's the idea that increased mechanization or increased production efficiency would mean lower rates of employment. It is a fallacy, the thinking goes, because increases in production efficiency won't lead to the loss of jobs; instead of getting rid of employees, industrial concerns will use ever more employees to produce ever more stuff.
And here we are, nearly two hundred years after mechanization: we can consider the 'Luddite Fallacy' fallacious (sounds dirty!), because if there's one thing we produce a lot of, it's stuff. Far too much stuff. The production of ever more stuff has not abated. We're drowning in stuff and the oceans we once thought infinite are choking with stuff and all of that stuff is produced by a staggering number of people working. That's another story.
Fine - but I think the 'Luddite Fallacy' is one of those half-truths that are worse than a lie. Think of England, poor, fucked up England, where all of my industrial contacts are trying to pull the plug because it's a mess. We see people having jobs, yes - but incredibly crap, incredibly tenuous unskilled jobs in parts of the service sector that are the first to feel the pain when consumers start to worry. We see the benefit of stuff in their professional lives, that great surfeit of stuff with which we're polluting the world: it provides the Inselaffen jobs by having them sell it, not manufacture it. And then we see the Luddite Fallacy isn't a fallacy, but a half-arsed equivocation by the people who use the term.
Sure, English people are employed (though dramatically less so these days), but one kind of employment is not another, and there's nothing more replaceable or sackable than your standard service worker. What would happen if all the sweatshops servicing retailers like the Gap somehow managed to find out where each other was, and hold a co-ordinated strike? Fucking chaos - and they'd get what they wanted. But what would happen if all the salespeople at the Gap went on strike? A bunch of salespeople would get fired and replaced by a bunch of 18 year olds who want staff discounts. Maybe for a couple of days the shirts wouldn't be as nicely folded. Oh noes.
So the question for me: was the mechanization process that began two hundred years ago the beginning of the slow castration of the unprivileged classes in Britain? One part of my brain says no, of course not, the mechanization process turned the unprivileged classes into the working class, and the working class became a political force, and functioned as such until its balls were cut off in the 1970's. Another part of my brain says yes, of course, because mechanization ended the need for artisanal, skilled labourers, which meant you could send the machines to a country full of desperate people who you could bully into dropping tariffs and environmental/labour standards. Of course you'd be a fool not to. But the upshot is I don't know which part of my brain is right, or if neither is right.
And I want to, I want to know far more about how all this happened, and why the country of my mothers - my country, I suppose, though I'm a second-class citizen - is such a shithole now. All of which brings me back to Shirley - I need to know how a thoughtful, gentle and dreadfully conventional woman (as the Life has shown Brontë to be) wrote about the Luddites - how she presented them to her huge fan base down south - how she reconciled the misery of the working class in the West Riding with her need for political and religious continuity. And once it gets personal enough for me, I'm wading into the Luddites.
domenica, febbraio 22, 2009
Of cleverness and romance
Blew through most of Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë this weekend after finding it for 50 centimes whilst hung over, and having Charlotte Brontë on the brain whilst mulling over for the millionth time why she was so down on Jane Austen, and having Elizabeth Gaskell on the brain after last week's Thomas Hardy and wondering what he owed to her in terms of popular acceptance, if not style, vis à vis all that there 'social realism'. Irresistible. It's these stunning, serendipitous shopping conquests that keep me going to the used bookstores instead of messing about with Amazon. It's a delightfully written autobiography, but more on that when my punishing lifestyle (from now on, it may be taken as read that Monday mornings feel absolutely tragic, and weekends feel three hours long) lets me finish the fucker.
And more on the Austen/Brontë split. I had always assumed that the reason Charlotte Brontë found Jane Austen so tedious was that Austen isn't romantic enough, which seems a strange thought now when our screens are perpetually littered with lousy, vaseline-lensed, ladywank fantasy adaptations of Pride and Prejudice et al. But Austen isn't romantic relative to the Brontë sisters, or to Charlotte's big hero Sir Walter Scott; relative to all that, Austen narrates these perfectly believable, self-contained stories wherein the supernatural doesn't intervene and women get by as best they can, and if the lead women always marry men richer than they are at the end it's because Austen chose stories where that makes sense, rather than nudging her characters into acting artificially.
So that's what I thought Charlotte Brontë meant by calling Jane Austen's novels 'more real than true', and why I thought she was being unfair; to me, and to legions of modern fans, I don't doubt, a big part of the charm of Jane Austen's novels is that they're amusing and interesting without seeming artificial in their construction, that once you sink into the world of an Austen novel there are no events or proclamations that seem to interrupt the flow of things making sense.
But now, having gone through most of the autobiography, which is full of Brontë's letters, which are much less wordy and high-falutin' than her books - very engaging, very affectionate, and rather tart - the objection seems a little more clear in a couple of ways.
First, on top of her charms in terms of creating a seamless literary universe, the way Austen puts words together, the sentences she makes - I can't remember who pointed this out to me, but whoever it was was dead right - are very, very nice and characteristic sorts of sentences. This technical skill as a sentence maker extends to how nicely her books are constructed as a whole. So nice, and so consistent, that perhaps writers like Charlotte Brontë, who admired writers like Sir Walter Scott so much, might see them as trite; they use so few words, comparatively, to get an idea across, and the nice symmetrical structure perhaps could seem too facile - perhaps it would all seem flippant rather than substantial. Consider three books I love; first, the first paragraph of Jane Eyre:
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
It goes on to introduce us to our heroine, and her miserable life at her aunt's, and the book goes on for a good long bit before we meet our principals, Rochester not coming in until a third of the way through - a breath of the existence of the uncle and the cousins not until towards the middle and end respectively.
And of Ivanhoe:
In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster. The remains of this extensive wood are still to be seen at the noble seats of Wentworth, of Warncliffe Park, and around Rotherham. Here haunted of yore the fabulous Dragon of Wantley; here were fought many of the most desperate battles during the Civil Wars of the Roses; and here also flourished in ancient times those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have been rendered so popular in English song.
And there follows more historical background, and our introduction to the swineherd Gurth and the jester Wamba; the book runs on for nearly its half until we meet all the main characters.
And of Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
By the end of the first chapter, we have some idea of every major character in the book, and they stay with us until the end.
Can you spot the difference?
Now, reading Brontë's letters in Gaskell's book, I see she had very clean powers of construction, rather cleaner than are evident in Jane Eyre (I love Jane Eyre's construction, but I love it like I love a baggy, bulging Hundertwasser building, and not like I love beautiful snowflakes). And if she had chosen to - if that had been her fixed idea of great literature throughout her life - I have no doubt she could have written something as tidy and symmetrical as Pride and Prejudice. But she didn't and it wasn't. So, in that case, what's left to do except hate Jane Austen's books? They're a different sort of beast altogether - a different, sparer philosophy of construction - that must either be deeply admired for its cleverness and simplicity, or dismissed by a Romantic as 'more real than true'. From a Romantic perspective they just look too easy - too effortless - to seem as though they hit on something fundamental about our human nature.
And second: yes, maybe Brontë disliked Austen's books for not being romantic enough, but there's a reason for that I hadn't fully appreciated before, in terms of Romance and conventions. Gaskell shows Brontë to be, politically speaking, religiously speaking, conventional - not a bigot, not close-minded, close emotionally to Dissenters, close physically to Luddites, but herself deeply attached to the continuity of the power structures of her father's church and the English political establishment. I can't but feel that for a kind, gentle, unbigoted person to maintain such close attachment to conventional power structures, a little fantasy is necessary - fantastical, romantic notions of history, serendipity, 'unnatural' villainy, and God's/the supernatural's occasional intervention in the blatant unfairness of human life and relationships under these power structures. Which is fine. I enjoy that sort of fantasy when it's well-written.
But those sorts of measures were things Austen ignored completely. Her endings were happy, happy enough to lend themselves well to endless revolting films execs bust their balls trying to turn into bodice-rippers. But they were happy because her heroes and heroines, sometimes through efforts of incredible but banal communicative strength, managed to make each other understand the depth of their emotions across social pitfalls no less steep for being ridiculous and artificial. They're books about human effort and narrow escapes from human misery due to human social folly; human and folly always being the keyword.
There's no divine intervention; there're no ghosts or madwomen or kings riding in and telling everybody what to do, there are no heartless villains. They're just human books in an elegant, simple, symmetrical format; all deeply conscious that no force except self-knowledge and force of character will make things work out in the end in an unfair and profane world. I imagine they would seem almost profane, in the mercilessness of their observational powers, to a writer whose convictions were romantic and conventional.
And more on the Austen/Brontë split. I had always assumed that the reason Charlotte Brontë found Jane Austen so tedious was that Austen isn't romantic enough, which seems a strange thought now when our screens are perpetually littered with lousy, vaseline-lensed, ladywank fantasy adaptations of Pride and Prejudice et al. But Austen isn't romantic relative to the Brontë sisters, or to Charlotte's big hero Sir Walter Scott; relative to all that, Austen narrates these perfectly believable, self-contained stories wherein the supernatural doesn't intervene and women get by as best they can, and if the lead women always marry men richer than they are at the end it's because Austen chose stories where that makes sense, rather than nudging her characters into acting artificially.
So that's what I thought Charlotte Brontë meant by calling Jane Austen's novels 'more real than true', and why I thought she was being unfair; to me, and to legions of modern fans, I don't doubt, a big part of the charm of Jane Austen's novels is that they're amusing and interesting without seeming artificial in their construction, that once you sink into the world of an Austen novel there are no events or proclamations that seem to interrupt the flow of things making sense.
But now, having gone through most of the autobiography, which is full of Brontë's letters, which are much less wordy and high-falutin' than her books - very engaging, very affectionate, and rather tart - the objection seems a little more clear in a couple of ways.
First, on top of her charms in terms of creating a seamless literary universe, the way Austen puts words together, the sentences she makes - I can't remember who pointed this out to me, but whoever it was was dead right - are very, very nice and characteristic sorts of sentences. This technical skill as a sentence maker extends to how nicely her books are constructed as a whole. So nice, and so consistent, that perhaps writers like Charlotte Brontë, who admired writers like Sir Walter Scott so much, might see them as trite; they use so few words, comparatively, to get an idea across, and the nice symmetrical structure perhaps could seem too facile - perhaps it would all seem flippant rather than substantial. Consider three books I love; first, the first paragraph of Jane Eyre:
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
It goes on to introduce us to our heroine, and her miserable life at her aunt's, and the book goes on for a good long bit before we meet our principals, Rochester not coming in until a third of the way through - a breath of the existence of the uncle and the cousins not until towards the middle and end respectively.
And of Ivanhoe:
In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster. The remains of this extensive wood are still to be seen at the noble seats of Wentworth, of Warncliffe Park, and around Rotherham. Here haunted of yore the fabulous Dragon of Wantley; here were fought many of the most desperate battles during the Civil Wars of the Roses; and here also flourished in ancient times those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have been rendered so popular in English song.
And there follows more historical background, and our introduction to the swineherd Gurth and the jester Wamba; the book runs on for nearly its half until we meet all the main characters.
And of Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
By the end of the first chapter, we have some idea of every major character in the book, and they stay with us until the end.
Can you spot the difference?
Now, reading Brontë's letters in Gaskell's book, I see she had very clean powers of construction, rather cleaner than are evident in Jane Eyre (I love Jane Eyre's construction, but I love it like I love a baggy, bulging Hundertwasser building, and not like I love beautiful snowflakes). And if she had chosen to - if that had been her fixed idea of great literature throughout her life - I have no doubt she could have written something as tidy and symmetrical as Pride and Prejudice. But she didn't and it wasn't. So, in that case, what's left to do except hate Jane Austen's books? They're a different sort of beast altogether - a different, sparer philosophy of construction - that must either be deeply admired for its cleverness and simplicity, or dismissed by a Romantic as 'more real than true'. From a Romantic perspective they just look too easy - too effortless - to seem as though they hit on something fundamental about our human nature.
And second: yes, maybe Brontë disliked Austen's books for not being romantic enough, but there's a reason for that I hadn't fully appreciated before, in terms of Romance and conventions. Gaskell shows Brontë to be, politically speaking, religiously speaking, conventional - not a bigot, not close-minded, close emotionally to Dissenters, close physically to Luddites, but herself deeply attached to the continuity of the power structures of her father's church and the English political establishment. I can't but feel that for a kind, gentle, unbigoted person to maintain such close attachment to conventional power structures, a little fantasy is necessary - fantastical, romantic notions of history, serendipity, 'unnatural' villainy, and God's/the supernatural's occasional intervention in the blatant unfairness of human life and relationships under these power structures. Which is fine. I enjoy that sort of fantasy when it's well-written.
But those sorts of measures were things Austen ignored completely. Her endings were happy, happy enough to lend themselves well to endless revolting films execs bust their balls trying to turn into bodice-rippers. But they were happy because her heroes and heroines, sometimes through efforts of incredible but banal communicative strength, managed to make each other understand the depth of their emotions across social pitfalls no less steep for being ridiculous and artificial. They're books about human effort and narrow escapes from human misery due to human social folly; human and folly always being the keyword.
There's no divine intervention; there're no ghosts or madwomen or kings riding in and telling everybody what to do, there are no heartless villains. They're just human books in an elegant, simple, symmetrical format; all deeply conscious that no force except self-knowledge and force of character will make things work out in the end in an unfair and profane world. I imagine they would seem almost profane, in the mercilessness of their observational powers, to a writer whose convictions were romantic and conventional.
mercoledì, febbraio 18, 2009
Of truth and coincidences
'"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or
made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave,
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name."'
Shit.
So it was excellent, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I've heard Thomas Hardy was one of those who bucked under the strain of magazine serialization a bit - having to have an 'event' every week, in every short chapter - one of those shocks or coincidences that I quite enjoy but which alienates so many people from Victorian literature, because they seem unrealistic . And to a certain extent that strain tells, as events get left trailing. Why did Susan esteem Donald so much as a match for her daughter? What accounts for the intimacy of Donald and Elizabeth-Jane's father at the end? There's an 'event' or coincidence there evidently that got left out . . .
But it doesn't matter at all in terms of the quality of the book, as far as I'm concerned, because of the psychological perfection of the characters. To me this is what makes great literature. Perfect plots are the aim of superhero comics, primetime television series, and Martin Amis literary turds; great literature should be psychologically true. As a society we're so caught up in the idea of artistic realism, straying no farther from it in our blockbuster modern lit than surrealism or magic realism or neorealism but always realism, realism, realism, and that makes us as audiences and authors fall into the description Charlotte Brontë (I think unfairly) applied to Jane Austen - our literature "is more real than true."
We laugh at Dickens, and we want our literature to turn on one or two ridiculous coincidences at most, forgetting that if we take any given starting point, whether it be in real life or in any narrative, and trace its path to an end we've marked out, every event driving the story to its conclusion is a ridiculous coincidence with an incredibly small chance of having occurred in a random universe. And in consequence our literature tends to the unrealistically bland and uneventful, to the wordy, to the self-referential - firmly stuck up the author's own ass (Ian McEwan, isn't it getting crowded up there?) Bring on the coincidences, say I. In real life they've worked out well for me thus far, and in literature they provide the best showcase yet discovered for showing off characters' psychological truths, the best showcase for preventing an author from inadvertently writing a false memoir instead of a true novel.
So The Mayor of Casterbridge is a psychological masterpiece. Henchard is a horrible cunt who engineers his own utter destruction with what seems like a dogged tenacity, but we're made to know him so well that it's as impossible to wholeheartedly hate him as it would a close family member who'd acted in such a way, and when his will comes (copied above) it's excruciatingly pitiable. Donald and Lucetta are perfectly mapped out in their relative amiability, weakness of character, and attractiveness; Susan is painted perfectly as an ignorant, good woman doing what she could with what she got. And Elizabeth-Jane - Hardy meant us to fall in love with Elizabeth-Jane, I suppose . . . a truly good, unsullied girl who's more interesting than porridge. What a feat.
'But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.'
made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave,
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name."'
Shit.
So it was excellent, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I've heard Thomas Hardy was one of those who bucked under the strain of magazine serialization a bit - having to have an 'event' every week, in every short chapter - one of those shocks or coincidences that I quite enjoy but which alienates so many people from Victorian literature, because they seem unrealistic . And to a certain extent that strain tells, as events get left trailing. Why did Susan esteem Donald so much as a match for her daughter? What accounts for the intimacy of Donald and Elizabeth-Jane's father at the end? There's an 'event' or coincidence there evidently that got left out . . .
But it doesn't matter at all in terms of the quality of the book, as far as I'm concerned, because of the psychological perfection of the characters. To me this is what makes great literature. Perfect plots are the aim of superhero comics, primetime television series, and Martin Amis literary turds; great literature should be psychologically true. As a society we're so caught up in the idea of artistic realism, straying no farther from it in our blockbuster modern lit than surrealism or magic realism or neorealism but always realism, realism, realism, and that makes us as audiences and authors fall into the description Charlotte Brontë (I think unfairly) applied to Jane Austen - our literature "is more real than true."
We laugh at Dickens, and we want our literature to turn on one or two ridiculous coincidences at most, forgetting that if we take any given starting point, whether it be in real life or in any narrative, and trace its path to an end we've marked out, every event driving the story to its conclusion is a ridiculous coincidence with an incredibly small chance of having occurred in a random universe. And in consequence our literature tends to the unrealistically bland and uneventful, to the wordy, to the self-referential - firmly stuck up the author's own ass (Ian McEwan, isn't it getting crowded up there?) Bring on the coincidences, say I. In real life they've worked out well for me thus far, and in literature they provide the best showcase yet discovered for showing off characters' psychological truths, the best showcase for preventing an author from inadvertently writing a false memoir instead of a true novel.
So The Mayor of Casterbridge is a psychological masterpiece. Henchard is a horrible cunt who engineers his own utter destruction with what seems like a dogged tenacity, but we're made to know him so well that it's as impossible to wholeheartedly hate him as it would a close family member who'd acted in such a way, and when his will comes (copied above) it's excruciatingly pitiable. Donald and Lucetta are perfectly mapped out in their relative amiability, weakness of character, and attractiveness; Susan is painted perfectly as an ignorant, good woman doing what she could with what she got. And Elizabeth-Jane - Hardy meant us to fall in love with Elizabeth-Jane, I suppose . . . a truly good, unsullied girl who's more interesting than porridge. What a feat.
'But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.'
giovedì, maggio 08, 2008
Hourglasses
Creeping towards the weekend like a parched man dragging himself to a well. Starting to get a disconnected feeling. No time for my own brain. Mighty force of will to give the F-word some of the attention he deserves. Bad dreams about being trapped in a library with the fear Bluebeard will pop up behind me and we'll have to try to have a conversation, or else a duel to the death - either would suck. Still can't believe my aunt is gone.
And on top of all that, I really don't like Bruce Chatwin's Songlines, or at least the first 72 pages of it. I love Bruce Chatwin as a travel writer, and I really liked On the Black Hill, his weirdo Welsh epic I read a couple of months ago. Songlines is crappily smug and tedious in comparison. That hurts, as it's the first thing of his I haven't liked, and I like liking all of what a person publishes. Like Jane Austen or Nick Cave or Patrick Süskind or Bach. Knowing that I can grab whatever of theirs and get into it without worrying that I'll be wasting my time with crap. Time . . . can't waste it.
I have a feeling Emily Brontë would be another person who would have written stuff I'd have loved consistently. You know, they reckon she did write another book before she died besides Wuthering Heights. Her sister Charlotte burnt it, after Emily died. If that's true, Charlotte should be remembered as much for that as for Jane Eyre. But I suppose time has tamped down the possibility of knowing that for sure. Time - always a question of fucking time! It's why I would have liked to be a professional historian - cheating time a bit and finding out its secrets before it buries itself in itself forever. And it's also why I chose not to be a professional historian despite the exhortations of my professors - I was afraid I'd bury myself in time before my own personal time buried me itself.
And on top of all that, I really don't like Bruce Chatwin's Songlines, or at least the first 72 pages of it. I love Bruce Chatwin as a travel writer, and I really liked On the Black Hill, his weirdo Welsh epic I read a couple of months ago. Songlines is crappily smug and tedious in comparison. That hurts, as it's the first thing of his I haven't liked, and I like liking all of what a person publishes. Like Jane Austen or Nick Cave or Patrick Süskind or Bach. Knowing that I can grab whatever of theirs and get into it without worrying that I'll be wasting my time with crap. Time . . . can't waste it.
I have a feeling Emily Brontë would be another person who would have written stuff I'd have loved consistently. You know, they reckon she did write another book before she died besides Wuthering Heights. Her sister Charlotte burnt it, after Emily died. If that's true, Charlotte should be remembered as much for that as for Jane Eyre. But I suppose time has tamped down the possibility of knowing that for sure. Time - always a question of fucking time! It's why I would have liked to be a professional historian - cheating time a bit and finding out its secrets before it buries itself in itself forever. And it's also why I chose not to be a professional historian despite the exhortations of my professors - I was afraid I'd bury myself in time before my own personal time buried me itself.
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