Circumcision and the Deronda

What's a footnote?

So this is a thing and it cracked me up. I was peacefully googling for some information about Judaism in Daniel Deronda because I vaguely envisioned a comparison to Ulysses. (Why would I do that? Because my life contains too little pain and I must add to it.) And then I stumbled across this rather fascinating book chapter and nothing was the same again. 

Someone, somewhere, at some point in 1975, noticed something weird about Daniel Deronda's life story. Supposedly, his mother had given him away when he was two years old, because she didn't want him to be raised in the Jewish tradition. But if he was two, that meant he had already been circumcised. Circumcision was not widespread in Britain outside of Jewish circles. So the question arises: did Daniel never look down? Not to minimize people's ignorance of their own bodies and especially their genitals (if in doubt, read (almost) any romance novel and try to reconstruct female anatomy from it), but surely at some point he would have noticed. If not on his own, when reading up on Jewish traditions or when people started insisting that he might be of Jewish descent. 

So what gives? Literary criticism being the serious enterprise that it is, this did not devolve into a series of jokes about Deronda's dick. (Which is why I'm not an English major. I'll basically always go for the joke.) Instead it turned to a discussion about the problem of realism in the Victorian period. Did George Eliot realize this could be a potential problem for her plot? Given the care she put into researching this book, it is very likely that she did. And if so, did she try to give subtle hints of this? Like when she talks about Deronda sympathizing with Byron because of Byron's deformed foot, is she inviting us to make use of well-known urban legends about men with big feet and see Daniel as being ashamed of his own unusual penis? Why does she never talk of Deronda's nose? Henry James mentions Deronda's nose. Does he use it as an euphemism for penis or not? (Yes, someone wrote an academic article about this. Maybe there is hope for literary criticism after all.)

But suppose that feet are feet and noses are noses for a second. That would mean that George Eliot did not talk about Deronda's penis because she either did not realize it was a problem, or she thought no one would care. (And, to be fair, it did take 99 years before anyone did care.) The latter would imply that realism is a convention and one can ignore certain details even when they point to phallic-shaped plot holes.

I obviously think finding subtle hints in the novel is going too far and that one of the other options (Eliot didn't know or didn't care) is far more likely. It also never crossed my mind when reading to think of the state of Deronda's genitals, so I guess it's not just Victorians who are oblivious to such things. In any case, you should check out this chapter that talks at length about the whole debate. It's interesting.

Henry James Reviews Daniel Deronda

What's a footnote?

Here's a snippet I very much enjoyed. If you love Henry James or George Eliot, or both, you will probably enjoy it too. It's about Henry James' very unconventional review of Daniel Deronda. First some background details: Daniel Deronda was published in monthly installments between February and September of 1876, and Henry James' first reaction to it appeared in The Nation at the end of February. It was an unsigned note and largely positive, saying among other things this:

The "sense of the universal" is constant, omnipresent. It strikes us sometimes as rather conscious and over-cultivated; but it gives us the feeling that the threads of the narrative, as we gather them into our hands, are not the usual commercial measurement, but long electric wires capable of transmitting messages from mysterious regions.

Isn't the metaphor of the electric wires so suitable for Eliot and the way she incorporates universal messages into her narrative? Anyway, as more installments were published, Henry James' opinion changed. By June, we know from his correspondence with his brother, William, that his feelings about the novel were mostly negative, William too had a bad opinion of Daniel Deronda and its moralistic tone, an opinion sprinkled with a good dose of sexism. (Because we all know the world's greatest moralists were women?) Here's what Henry wrote to William in 1876:

Daniel Deronda strikes me (in proportion to its elaborate ability) a great failure compared with her other books. Gwendolen to me lives a little; but not the others: D.D. least of all. But the episode with Mordecai is fine.

But the interesting part came in December, when James published Daniel Deronda: A Conversation. It was a very unusual review, written as a dialogue between three characters. I was charmed by the idea, because all those contradictory feelings I had about the book could be expressed and discussed in one place and every character had something of value to add, in the end. I think it's the best way to convey the impression this book gives: a book complex enough to be discussed at length, but with a number of weak points that make one hesitate to declare it great.

So, what I am going to do now is give you a taste of each of the characters with a short description and an emblematic quote and then, at the end, a link to this piece that can be read online.

Theodora is portrayed as a romantic and somewhat silly girl. She is in love with Daniel Deronda and completely in awe of the book that contains him. She is George Eliot's groupie.

A book like Daniel Deronda becomes part of one's life; one lives in it or alongside of it. I don't hesitate to say that I have been living in this one for the last eight months. It is such a complete world George Eliot builds up; it is so vast, so much−embracing! It has such a firm earth and such an ethereal sky. You can turn into it and lose yourself in it.

Pulcheria, the other female character in the review, dislikes the book. Part of her dislike clearly stems out of anti-Semitism. (And there is more than a hint of her disliking Deronda because he's not masculine enough. He is a prig, but also too emotive, too womanly.) She attacks Eliot at every level imaginable, but she also scores some valid points along the way.

I never read a story with less current. It is not a river; it is a series of lakes. I once read of a group of little uneven ponds resembling, from a birds−eye view, a looking−glass which had fallen upon the floor and broken, and was lying in fragments. That is what Daniel Deronda would look like, on a birds−eye view.

Constantius is the level-headed man who brings nuance to the table. He admires George Eliot and understands what she tried to achieve in her book, but he calls Daniel Deronda the weakest of her books. Constantius' opinions are the most interesting and detailed, and he seems to be the one channeling James. To me, the following quote stood out, because I can't decide a. if it's true for Eliot and b. how much of it was informed by sexism (a woman who wants to philosophize rather than Feel is just denying her own nature and squandering her talent).

But it comes back to what I said just now about one's sense of the author writing under a sort of external pressure. I began to notice it in Felix Holt; I don't think I had before. She strikes me as a person who certainly has naturally a taste for general considerations, but who has fallen upon an age and a circle which have compelled her to give them an exaggerated attention. She does not strike me as naturally a critic, less still as naturally a sceptic; her spontaneous part is to observe life and to feel it, to feel it with admirable depth.

Intrigued by this? Go read the rest here, courtesy of the California Digital Library. And if you have an opinion about this problem of sense vs. sensibility in George Eliot's writing, please share. It's bugging me.

Review: Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

I've been an awful slacker lately. But no more. There's only one month left of A Victorian Celebration, so I've started on Collins and Darwin. But before I get to them, I need to get Daniel Deronda out of the way first, so this week is dedicated to it. I read this book twice and reread large parts of it in order to write this review. All things considered, I've spent a lot of time in the company of this narrator and these characters. But the more I reread, the more conflicted my feelings about this novel are.

Daniel Deronda presents two loosely interwoven stories. On one hand, we get the individual plight of Gwendolen Harleth. Gwendolen is a female character that I have the distinct impression of having met before, though I can't figure out where. She's young and beautiful, very sure of herself and of her place as the unofficial center of the universe. She's arrogant, high spirited and unsentimental. And she's punished for it. In order to escape poverty, she makes an unethical decision and marries a man who she knows ought to have married another. Her remorse and her efforts to find a moral way of living are connected with Daniel Deronda. He and Gwendolen meet accidentally at the beginning of the novel and he disapproves of her activities at the time (gambling). As a result of this first meeting and of his moral censure, Gwendolen casts him as her outer conscience. She relies on his advice to learn how to be good.

And she couldn't have chosen a better mentor, because Daniel Deronda? He's a man without faults. He is good, smart, handsome and modest on top of it. Not just Gwendolen, but everyone relies on him. He walks around saving kittens and Disney heroines from drowning. And though Eliot very nicely says that "Those who trust us educate us," you don't get to see much of that in Daniel's case, because good behavior seems to come naturally to him. But there is one thing amiss in the life of young Deronda: he doesn't know who his parents are. His getting involved with the Jewish community through Mirah, the young Disney heroine woman he saved, and Mordecai, a visionary Zionist, make up the universal, intellectually-elevated side of the novel (as opposed to Gwendolen's story, I guess). Daniel gradually warms up to the idea that he might be of Jewish descent. Which, as it turns out, he is.

There is enough in this novel to keep you returning to it, to make you want to examine it further. But there are also some weak points that interfered with my ability to fully enjoy it, especially at the second reading. So I will just quickly list what I liked and what I didn't like below.

The Good

The morally-flawed characters seem to be this novel's greatest achievement. Gwendolen is quite captivating, especially in the first part of the novel. She is an example of how to create a  multifaceted character starting from just a couple of defining features. Another example is her husband, who is an interesting study in cruelty. You get to understand how their minds work, but you still wait for their actions with interest. They are not boringly predictable (which, sadly, some of the positive characters, including Deronda himself, are).

My second-favorite thing about this novel is the way its themes and motifs work together like in a symphony. I don't think its construction overall is sound (see below), but I really appreciated the attempt. The problem of parentage, of having absent or bad parents, emerges for Daniel, for Gwendolen, for Mirah, and even for the Meyrick family. The problem of inheritance, both material and spiritual, is present for Sir Hugo, for Grandcourt and his son outside of marriage, for Mordecai, for Daniel in relation with his lost family. Art and the difference between geniuses and amateurs concern Klesmer, the music master, and his employers; Hans, Daniel's friend, who's a painter; Mirah and her father, who used to work in the theater; Daniel's mother, who was a singer; Daniel and Gwendolen, who are both amateurs, but understand the purpose of art very differently. Even the character of Sir Hugo, the well-meaning but down-to-earth gentleman who raised Daniel, is mirrored in Gwendolen's world by Mr. Gascoigne.

The Bad

Can you spell "saccharine"? Because you are going to get a fair amount of that when it comes to the positive characters. Mirah is a character who lives to embody virtue and cross her feet and hands daintily (I lost count of how many times she does that over the course of the book). The Meyrick family is cute in a very Little Women style, but then I was alternatively bored and annoyed by Little Women, so I didn't really appreciate its charm. And presiding over this cast of goody-goodies, Daniel Deronda, the good man par excellence.

But beside the fact that half of the characters were just too good to be true, my problem was that they seemed to dominate the book. After a very strong start on Gwendolen's story, the shift to Daniel's perspective was welcome, but the space his story received seemed disproportionate. In the middle of the book, Gwendolen is simply absent. The way their stories entwine again was a little artificial (especially since it relies in the end on a huge coincidence). Another problem was that plotlines are started and then completely dropped, like in the case of Klesmer's romance with Miss Arrowpoint. It was a cute romance, predicated on their shared intellectual interests, and Miss Arrowpoint was a refreshingly determined female character. But their story simply disappears from the novel's map, until someone reports on it indirectly in the second half, like an afterthought.

The Really, Really Preachy 

Jewish identity and Zionism. I wish I didn't have this problem with the novel, because I really appreciate what Eliot tried to do here. I think she succeeded in revealing the way prejudice against a minority works. Even the good characters (Deronda, the Meyricks) are not unbiased towards Jewish people. They embrace Mirah, but at the same time they wish she'd give up her faith. The saintly Daniel looks unkindly at a Jewish family and judges their every gesture in a way he wouldn't with a Christian family. (He reforms his ways. See: saintly.) This is all wonderfully done, and I love Eliot for it. It is relevant even today. At the same time, I don't identify with all the talk about identity, national or otherwise, and didn't feel that Daniel's conversations with Mordecai came to life the way Gwendolen's problems did.

Bottom Line

I know I spent 2/3 of the review complaining about various details, but I'm going to give this book 4 out of 5 stars. Because I admire what Eliot set out to do, love the parts of that project she did accomplish, and think there are enough good things in this book to keep one engrossed for a long time. Which is why I'm going to return to it in a series of footnotes.

George Eliot - The Lifted Veil : Footnote #2

What's a footnote?

When I reviewed this, I talked a little about Latimer being an unreliable narrator and how this fact could influence the way we read the novella. I didn't insist on that, because my thoughts on the matter were not entirely clear (my thoughts rarely are, as this parenthesis amply proves). I'm coming back to it now, because I stumbled across a Shakespeare quote the other day that I think perfectly describes our options when it comes to Latimer and the meaning of this story:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

--from A Midsummer Night's Dream                                                              

So how does this concern The Lifted Veil? If we don't take the book at face value, if we don't assume that everything Latimer says is true, then we need an explanation for why he'd invent such a story. I think that there are three main interpretations that let us circumvent the paranormal elements (there might be more, but these are the ones I could think of and they work with Shakespeare, so there. :-) They are the options emphasized in the quote above: Latimer could be a lunatic, a lover or a poet, depending on the way you read the text.

1. Latimer as the lunatic - this is a story about madness 

This is probably the easiest choice. Here we have a character that claims he's able to read minds and see the future. He has visions of things that haven't happened yet (hallucinations) and listens to other people's inner monologues (hears voices). Sure, he brings a bunch of reasons that made him conclude his perceptions were not wrong. But why should we give him the benefit of the doubt? If Latimer is insane, then we can't be sure which parts of his discourse (if any) are to be trusted.

Also notice how no moment is left entirely unambiguous in this story. If we assume Latimer is sincerely reporting what he perceives to be real, then at least the reactions of the other characters, as reported by him, might give us a hint. But there is no instance in which Latimer's special powers are recognized by others (although there are two moments when it almost happens). Moreover, these powers disappear in a crucial moment for the plot, when they could and should have proven their usefulness. So this story can be read as a chronicle of delusion. This might be something that affects all paranormal fiction written in first person to a degree; I don't know. I do think it's especially clear in this case because of these very convenient ambiguities.

2. Latimer as a lover - this is a story about love and frustrated expectations 

This is perhaps a less plausible explanation, but it is my favorite. To me, it is fascinating how easily this story could have turned into a realistic portrayal of a failed marriage. I'm not of course arguing that it is actually the case, only that it could be read as a metaphor for that, as the discourse of a somewhat overly-dramatic man trying to make sense of his bad marriage by simultaneously romanticizing it and placing all of the blame on his wife.

To Latimer, in the end, love seems to be built on mutual ignorance and delusion. He was initially attracted to Bertha because she was the one person whose mind he couldn't read. (And in case you were wondering, yes, the force of my will is the only thing standing between you and Twilight jokes at this point.) So he fell in love not with her precisely, but more with his own image of her:

Before marriage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secret to me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if it were hers.

The moment the honeymoon is over and they get to really know each other, Latimer and Bertha are deeply disappointed. Their marriage is poisoned by the conflict between reality and their own expectations. Seen through this lens, the story has a quite interesting, if pessimistic, message about the basis of romantic love and its evolution. In the end, one might be better off not lifting that veil.

How many things can I illustrate with Magritte? ALL the things.

3. Latimer as a poet - this is a story about the writer's condition

This is the interpretation Latimer himself suggests in the beginning. He had always had a poet's disposition but lacked a creative outlet for it. He takes his first visions as overdue manifestations of his poetic talent. It would be very interesting if this were actually the case - if Latimer invented everything or at least large parts of the story - mainly because it raises some questions about the relationship between a writer and their work. Remember just how much Latimer hates knowing every person's inner thoughts. If this is the world he created, then he is far from sympathetic towards it. As a writer, he sees himself in constant contact with the worst side of humanity.

So, if you've read this book, what do you think? Do you side with any of these readings (including the one that takes the piece at face-value)? Do you think it's a mix of these themes?

Or perhaps this should just be read as "repressed artistic inclinations lead to madness," in which case, excuse me, I should go write My Novel™ now. I'm not taking any chances. 

George Eliot - The Lifted Veil: Footnote

What's a footnote?

What's this: Alexis and I are both very wordy people that love to dissect the books they read. Since the review format - already burdened by our usual wordiness - can't really accommodate all of our musings and splittings of hairs, and we do consider these two activities essential to our reading happiness, we thought it would be best to have a cluster of posts for each book. One of the posts will be the main review, the others will be discussions of other aspects that caught our fancy and couldn't fit into the review. We'll call them footnotes. 

My first promised footnote for George Eliot's The Lifted Veil concerns one passage that struck me as beautiful. It's a description of Prague in summer: Latimer's first ever vision of the future. It's useless for me to further sing its praises; just read it. It's longish, but well worth your time, I promise:

My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he left my mind resting on the word PRAGUE, with a strange sense that a new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine of a long-past century arrested in its course—unrefreshed for ages by dews of night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal gold-inwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of ancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their court in the worn and crumbling pomp of the palace which stretches its monotonous length on the height; who worship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by no fear or hope, but compelled by their doom to be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit, as they live on in perpetual midday, without the repose of night or the new birth of morning.

The weird thing about this sequence is that, as I read it, I was convinced that I had read something very similar before. The bad news is that I was wrong. The good news is that I was only partially so, and that I now want to read the story this reminded me of - Death in Venice. Mann's Venice is a little different from Eliot's Prague and the way he depicts it is different too. He makes Venice almost into a character with a life of its own running parallel to the life of his main character, Aschenbach. Consequently, he doesn't exactly describe the city; he lets it interact with the hero. You get the image of Venice not through the comparatively bland descriptive passages, but through the hero's reaction to it, through his increasingly altered state of mind. 

From here.

So perhaps Mann's Venice and Eliot's Prague are not so similar after all. But still, there is at least this one fragment, where Aschenbach is walking through streets of oppressive heat and time that stood still, that I felt he could have been walking through Eliot's Prague instead. What do you think?

His head was burning, his body sticky with sweat, his neck quivering, and, plagued by an intolerable thirst, he looked round for immediate refreshment of any kind. He bought some fruit at a little greengrocer’s shop—strawberries, soft, overripe goods—and ate as he walked. A small deserted square that seemed under a curse opened up before him, and he recognized it: it was there he had formulated his abortive escape plan a few weeks before. He sank down on the steps of the well in the middle of the square, resting his head against its iron rim. All was quiet. There was grass coming up between the cobblestones and litter lying about. Among the weathered buildings of unequal height ringing the square he noticed one resembling a palazzo and having Gothic arch windows with empty space behind them and balconies adorned by lions. There was an apothecary on the ground floor of another, and the smell of carbolic acid wafted over to him on an occasional gust of warm wind.

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (translation by Michael Heim)         

Review: George Eliot - The Lifted Veil

I was always able to pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with a book. It's the moment my mind strains to move faster than my eyes while, at the same time, longing to stop and marvel at the view. That feeling, the push and pull of loving a book? I never got it with George Eliot. Don't get me wrong - I like her books quite a lot. So far I've read Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda, and admired their construction, their characters, the style - was in awe of them at times, to be honest. I would call her one of my favorite writers. But my appreciation of her skills is still only intellectual. She has never left me breathless. (The only possible exception? The first chapter of Middlemarch. I walked around convinced that I was Dorothea Brooke minus "that kind of beauty" for a full day after reading it.)

I wondered why that was and came to the conclusion that it was probably the way the moral and intellectual themes are sometimes spelled out in her books. It stood to reason. The preachier a narrator gets, the less I enjoy a book, which is precisely why The Mill on the Floss is my least favorite of Eliot's novels. So, I said to myself, what better way to test this theory than by reading a novella that was described to be a. very different from the rest of Eliot's work and b. free of her omniscient (read: know-it-all) narrator? You can see the results below, and they're not at all what I expected.

The Lifted Veil - Summary & Quotes

[land of shameless spoilers. do scroll down if you're not into that.]

The Lifted Veil is written as a deathbed confession, except that its narrator, Latimer, is not on his deathbed yet. He can, however, see the future so he knows that his end is near and inevitable. One month from now he'll die in his office from a heart attack, while his servants are too busy bickering to attend to him. In the meantime, he plans to write the strange story of his life in the hopes of garnering "some pity, some tenderness, some charity" that he feels have eluded him during his lifetime.