Music and The Other City

Because my review for The Other City turned out so long, I decided to leave out one clever detail from the book that I initially wanted to discuss. But since it's my blog and since I had the inspiration to institute the footnotes & reviews system for situations such as this, there's nothing stopping me from discussing it separately. So here it is.

It's about music. We discussed previously about how the other city has a weird language that has the same words like ours but seems to be incomprehensible gibberish otherwise. As you read, the temptation to find hidden meanings in every sentence is very strong. The narrator describes this impulse so well when he says

I had encountered the words and gestures of the inhabitants of the other city, the screeches of its creatures, and the stiff poses of its statues like a hieroglyphic text, whose shapes from time to time have been penetratingly and almost painfully cut through by the incandescent discharge of unifying meaning, but every time it had been extinguished before I managed to grasp it. 

But it's not only the language that is obscure. Music itself is different in the other city. (Does music qualify as a language? I'm not sure.) When the narrator first hears it, at the end of a religious service in a subterranean church of the other city, he describes it as "a monotonous tinkling" that "maybe (...) was supposed to be music." And then, when people sing, this is what it sounds like to him, not so much music as noise: 

The worshipers (...) started to sing a long drawn-out wordless melody in which I could detect no rhythm or system, and which most resembled the random sounds of wind shaking tin window seals on winter evenings. I listened to the strange song and waited to see if anything else would happen, but there was simply the sound of that formless singing, just unending intonements of a single note, after which the melody would abruptly rise or fall and remain fixed once more into a long single note. The singing was putting me to sleep (...).

In the absence of a rhythm or system, this is barely recognizable as music. This is at the end of chapter 3. At the end of chapter 5, after hearing some stories about the other city and chasing the marble streetcar that takes people away from the normal world, the narrator is in a garden. He hears a "magical music to which [he] felt irresistibly drawn." He follows it and discovers that what he took to be liturgical singing was actually a piece of tin roof shaken by the wind. Like the music in the subterranean church, the sound is soporific.

What is so nice about these two episodes is how they illustrate the constant search for meaning and structure, applied even to music. Seeing that the music in the garden was only his mind attributing intentionality where there was none should make the narrator doubt that there is any meaning to be found in the other city as well. (It doesn't.) But seeing how this sound was very similar to the one he heard in the church and yet this time he immediately recognized it as music instead of random noise, how his mind imposed an intentional pattern on nature on the basis of a prior experience, should perhaps make us, readers, wonder about the source of all demarcations like those between language and nonsense, music and noise. Is familiarity the only difference between what we are willing to accept as music and what we deem to be noise?

A Gripe about Ernesto Sabato's The Tunnel

Hello, everyone! I'm delighted to see you around in a new year, and I hope it will be a good one for you (and me as well)! I'd like to be able to say I have big plans for 2014, but right now my great ambition is to choose a good book to start my year with. I finished 2013 on a not-so-great note, with Sabato's The Tunnel, and I want to get the bad taste out of my mouth as soon as possible.

I read The Tunnel because it’s one of those books that are inescapable in my social circle. The author, Ernesto Sabato, used to be a physicist, and a rather successful one at that. He got a PhD in Theoretical Physics, a fellowship at the Marie Curie Institute, a position at MIT, the works. Then he quit and started writing and became successful as a writer, providing inspiration and hope for physics students with a taste in books and secret literary ambitions everywhere.

So I read The Tunnel fully expecting it to blow my mind. That didn’t happen: I think it’s a bad book and I also didn’t enjoy reading it. I will get around to reviewing it sometime soon, hopefully. In the meantime, I want to use this footnote to elaborate on the “not enjoying reading it” part. 

I realize that compartmentalizing my criticism like this may sound weird, since the intellectual assessment I make of a book and the experience of reading it can never be completely different things. But the peculiar thing about reading The Tunnel is that, even though I realized within the first few pages that I was not going to enjoy it, I had high hopes until the very end that it would turn out to be a good book. It had such good recommendations from people I trust (and I so wanted to like the writer) that I was sure there will be a great pay-off. I was waiting for, not hoping for, the twist or revelation that would illuminate the subject matter in an original way, making the obnoxiousness I was putting up with worth it. So now that I know there is no pay-off, I am amazed I managed to stand the torturously bad writing for so long, and I need to vent.

"Give Mr. Bast money, and don't bother about his ideals. He'll pick up those for himself."

What's this?

You should know this one thing about me: I'm a sucker for books that touch upon 19th century and turn-of-the-century reform movements. It doesn't need to be the main topic of the book, it doesn't even need to be portrayed in a positive light, the simple mention of your typical socialist circle will have my ears perk up. I confess I don't know enough about these movements, either from a historical or from a theoretical perspective, and that's something I always promise myself I'll fix and never do. But, from the low perch of my knowledge, I feel that these people's questions are like my questions, and that exploring them will teach me something valuable.  

What that something will be, I don't know, I haven't reached it yet. But here's an example of the kind of discussion that gives me a jolt of recognition. You might have encountered variations of its modern version on the internet. How should we help poor people? Should we give homeless people money or just stuff we bought for them with that money? Should we impose restrictions on money people get from the government and, if so, what kind of restrictions? Should we force a set of values on them, along with our money? And now here is a scene from Howards End: a discussion at the group frequented by the progressive Schlegel sisters. (The quote is long, but read it through, the last sentence alone makes it worth it. All random bolding my own.)

On Beauty and Objectification

What's this?

Here's a thing I found interesting about On Beauty. As it is made clear at various points throughout the text, the novel owes some of its ideas to Elaine Scarry's essay, On Beauty and Being Just (an essay I discussed at length in these two posts). The connection between fiction and a theory that might inform it is interesting and horribly complicated, and I don't really want to go into that here. But what I do want to point out is one way in which Smith departs from this theoretical framework, namely the fact that she engages more seriously with the idea that there is a darker side to beauty than Scarry does. This is especially true when it comes to the way we treat people based on their physical beauty.

You might remember that this was a sensitive point with Scarry, because she felt that Objectification as a buzzword turns academics away from honest discussions of beauty. She pushed instead for the idea that the beholder has long been understood (and should be still) as more vulnerable than the person beheld, because the beholder is in a way bewitched and helpless before beauty. Scarry then argues that this first reaction (this "pleasure-filled tumult") is a catalyst for our bringing more beauty into the world, in the form of art, fair laws etc.

You first get a sense that that might not be the case in Zadie Smith's world from the poem she quotes as belonging to one of her characters, Claire Malcolm, and which functions as a sort of second, intra-textual source for the novel's title. (On Beauty (the poem) was actually written by Nick Laird, and I think its title is also derived from Scarry's essay, which does sort of plunge us into Title Inception.) Here's the first stanza (and here is the rest of the poem):

3 Things About On the Road I Wish I Had Noticed on My Own

When I dislike a book, I tend to read a lot about it. As a result, I read more than a few papers about On the Road last week. Some of them were absolutely terrible, but some of them were awesome. Here are three of my favorites and the things I wouldn't have noticed without them.

1. Duke Ellington at the Metropolitan Opera

The last time Sal sees Dean is when he and his new girlfriend are on their way to a Duke Ellington concert and thus cannot offer Dean a ride. To put this in context: towards the end of the book, Sal found his dream girl, Laura, and they plan to move across the country, with Dean's help (notice the contrast between this planned, purposeful "migration" and Sal's past road trips). Dean, however, arrives too soon, before they had time to raise money to buy a car, and so he is forced to return without them. The night he leaves New York, Sal and Laura have to go to a Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera. Sal's old friend Remi, now turned "sad and fat" (read: bourgeois), bought tickets and is taking them to the concert in a Cadillac. Since Remi doesn't like Sal's friends, he refuses to give Dean a ride downtown.

But what does Duke Ellington's concert have to do with anything? Well, it has to do with a sort of "gentrification" of jazz that mirrors Sal's own evolution. Sal's old life was associated with jazz clubs, where there were no rules and no separation between the band and the crowd; the band's energy was freely transmitted and magnified by the public. Sal's new life is associated with Duke Ellington's performance at the Met, as a symbol of the institutionalization of jazz, of how jazz was adopted by the "elites" and became highbrow, governed by rules, separated from the public. That is to say, both Sal and jazz have been tamed.

I didn't notice it, but who did? Douglas Malcolm in “Jazz America”: Jazz and African American Culture in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (link leads to full text). If you want to read more about a) how these two attitudes towards jazz are both facets of appropriation or b) Kerouac's (mis)understanding of jazz in general, this article is highly recommended.

Kerouac on Spontaneous Prose (feat. Condescending T.S. Eliot)

From the bunch of things I read about Kerouac and On the Road last week, here's a snippet from a 1968 Paris Review interview with him (and as always, thank god for Paris Review interviews and the eloquence they always seem to prompt). For the most part, this is actually a pretty nice description of the principle behind the spontaneous prose style:

By not revising what you've already written you simply give the reader the actual workings of your mind during the writing itself: you confess your thoughts about events in your own unchangeable way . . . Well, look, did you ever hear a guy telling a long wild tale to a bunch of men in a bar and all are listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, to defray its rhythmic thought impact. . . . If he pauses to blow his nose, isn't he planning his next sentence? And when he lets that next sentence loose, isn't it once and for all the way he wanted to say it? Doesn't he depart from the thought of that sentence and, as Shakespeare says, “forever holds his tongue” on the subject, since he's passed over it like a part of a river that flows over a rock once and for all and never returns and can never flow any other way in time?

And then we got to this:

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

And, well, I couldn't help myself:

Oh really? Tell me more.

I am sorry, it's not that I am laughing at Kerouac and his shouty FEELINGS! vs CRAFTINESS! deal (although okay, I am laughing). It's just that Condescending T.S. Eliot really needs to be a thing on the internet.

Is Mr. Darcy's Pen a Metaphorical Penis?

"You write uncommonly fast." Ahem.

A couple of days ago, disappointed in some of the twists in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, I started to read up on Jane Austen's sexual politics. It is a common theme lately to debunk the sanitized image of Austen as an asexual spinster who never left her house and replace it with the image of an Austen we'd all like to hang out with: world-savvy, cuttingly funny, and quick on the double entendres. I do not know enough yet to tell if this reconstruction is more faithful to her character than the last, but I admit that a part of me cheers for this 3rd wave Jane Austen. (A part of me finds it slightly problematic, though, but that part needs to read a lot more before opening its mouth.)

Anyway, one of the articles I read this week is Jill Heydt-Stevenson's "Slipping into the Ha-Ha": Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen's Novels. Heydt-Stevenson argues that the racy elements some readers see in Austen's writing are not only there, but they are there for a purpose. They are a veiled - and thus acceptable - way of criticizing the patriarchy, of subverting its values. The dirty joke signals that the author sees through the patriarchy's game. Among other things, Austen uses this bawdy humor as a way of exposing the (rather crude) sexual and power dynamics behind the romantic ideal of courtship, as a way of "collapsing boundaries between prostitution and courtship."

There were a lot of things I appreciated in this article - and it's well worth a read - but there were also places where I felt it veered into "literary criticism gone mad." Take, for example, this exchange between a desperately flirtatious Caroline and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, Chapter X:

"I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you. I mend pens remarkably well."

"Thank you—but I always mend my own."

For Heydt-Stevenson, Caroline's line is a "powerful metonymy of phallic power," while Darcy's reply, recognizing her sexual allusion, "playfully invokes autoeroticism." The more I think of it, the more I think this cannot be right. Mind you, this is not just an exercise in interpreting metaphors Freudian-style, where no cigar is ever a cigar and "all vegetation is pubic hair" (to slightly misquote Maud Bailey). In order for this interpretation to work, the characters themselves must be in on the joke. But if they are, how is Darcy's reference to masturbation a good or cutting reply to Caroline's (supposed) innuendo? "Thank you, I've never needed a woman for that"? Is Darcy really the ultimate Socially Awkward Penguin?

But then again, perhaps I'm being naive and reading less into this than I should. (It happened before.) So I'm crowdsourcing this one. What do you think, internet? Is a pen just a pen? Is this pen a, erm, "powerful metonymy of phallic power" and its owner the Socially Awkward Penguin? Is there a third choice I'm missing?

Race in A Single Man: A Passage That Made Me Very Uncomfortable

What's a footnote?

I have mixed feelings about the way race is portrayed in A Single Man. On one hand, it is clear that Isherwood is trying to present sexual orientation as something that turns you into a minority much the same way race does. George, privileged on numerous axes (class, race, gender), is nonetheless a minority because of his sexual orientation. I'm not sure how groundbreaking this was at the time this novel was published, but I'm inclined to think it must have been, because thinking of sexual orientation in these terms dismantles narratives that present it as a sin or a crime. And this is very obvious when George has his terrorist fantasies about the oppressing majority, including people who want to tighten the laws against "sexual deviates." He's quick to think that Mexican and black people never figure into these violent scenarios, because they're not The Enemy:

Mexicans live here, so there are lots of flowers. Negroes live here, so it is cheerful. George would not care to live here, because they all blast all day long with their radios and television sets. But he would never find himself yelling at their children, because these people are not The Enemy. If they would ever accept George, they might even be allies.

On the other hand, George is not entirely at ease among people you'd classify as minorities. (And we won't include women here.) It's fair to say that every time someone who is not white appears, George thinks of them primarily in terms of their race. Asian people are enigmatic, but "by far the most beautiful creatures in the class; their beauty is like the beauty of plants, seemingly untroubled by vanity, anxiety or effort." And they continue to be enigmatic and plantlike every single time they make an appearance. The brightest black student in his class intimidates him because he "suspects her of suspecting him of all kinds of subtle discrimination."

I can accept this hyper-awareness. It's believable. I can accept the rambling discourse about minorities he delivers to his students when they ask him if Huxley was anti-Semitic. It makes a couple of good points: how minorities are not automatically angels just by virtue of having been oppressed or persecuted, how color-blindness is bullshit etc. But it also gets into very muddy waters (we'll call these muddy waters Godwin's Creek, colloquially known as "Ah, if only the Nazis were more frank about their feelings"):

Eminent Victorians: My Favorite Portrait

What's a footnote?

One of the best aspects of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians is his talent to succinctly and eloquently portray people that play secondary parts in the "plot" of our heroes' lives. Cardinal Newman, Sir Evelyn Baring, Gladstone, Lord Panmure, Lord Hartington, they all have a quality to them that is better than life. Reduced to a handful of traits, they are interesting in the way literary characters are. The elegance and intelligence of Strachey's style makes historical truths almost superfluous. (Might this be an occasion to use that nice proverb, se non è vero, è ben trovato - if it's not true, it still makes for a good story?)

The best example of this is the portrait of Monsignor Talbot, a secretary to Pope Pius IX. I think a lot of writers would be proud to have written this passage. It is perfect, down to the punchline:

Monsignor Talbot was a priest who embodied in a singular manner, if not the highest, at least the most persistent traditions of the Roman Curia. He was master of various arts which the practice of ages has brought to perfection under the friendly shadow of the triple tiara. He could mingle together astuteness and holiness without any difficulty; he could make innuendoes as naturally as an ordinary man makes statements of fact; he could apply flattery with so unsparing a hand that even Princes of the Church found it sufficient; and, on occasion, he could ring the changes of torture on a human soul with a tact which called forth universal approbation. With such accomplishments, it could hardly be expected that Monsignor Talbot should be remarkable either for a delicate sense of conscientiousness or for an extreme refinement of feeling, but then it was not for those qualities that Manning was in search when he went up the winding stair. He was looking for the man who had the ear of Pio Nono; and, on the other side of the low-arched door, he found him. Then he put forth all his efforts; his success was complete; and an alliance began which was destined to have the profoundest effect upon Manning’s career, and was only dissolved when, many years later, Monsignor Talbot was unfortunately obliged to exchange his apartment in the Vatican for a private lunatic asylum at Passy.

If you want to read more, Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, is copyright free and available on a good number of sites on the internet. Like here. Or here. Or here. (Okay, okay, I'll stop now.)

Gender Roles in The Woman in White

What's a footnote?

I haven't finished the review for The Woman in White yet, but this rant forced its way out of me as I was trying to write the said review. Since the order in which I post won't make much of a difference, I thought I'd post a footnote about the book before posting a proper review. (I know, I know, some (wo)men just want to watch the world burn.) Here it is then.

When a book starts with a sentence such as "This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure and what a Man's resolution can achieve," you might be tempted to think that there's nothing left to discuss. Case closed from the very first words: this book will be based on the most traditional of traditional gender roles. Women are passive and patient; men are active and determined. Women endure; men achieve. And one shouldn't blame Wilkie Collins for that, because he lived in the 19th century and was not as bright as John Stuart Mill (few people were, so that's not necessarily an insult either).

But then it looks as if the book doesn't exactly align to the roles prescribed in its very first sentence. You have male characters that are feeble, like the comically selfish Mr. Fairlie, and male characters that have a more emotional and artistic personality, like our hero, Walter Hartright. And, on the other side of the Great Gender Divide, you have Miss Marian Halcombe, who can walk on roofs, is as brave and resolute as any man, and seems to be a generally kickass Victorian heroine. So perhaps this book is pretty enlightened after all? The answer, alas, is no.

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.

Vintage Illustrations of Jane Austen's Persuasion

What's a footnote?

Do you know what we love? Books is a good answer. Old books is an even better answer. Old books with pretty illustrations the best answer (or at least, the best answer considering we don't want to be here all night). So I was pretty excited to come across a 1898 edition of Persuasion containing some lovely illustrations by C.E. Brock (who was apparently a well-known Victorian illustrator; thank you, Google, for that piece of information!).

You can see all six of these vintage illustrations below, together with their context in the book. Our favorite thing about illustrations is seeing how the artist envisioned the characters and how closely his sketches match the pictures we had in our minds. It is also the main reason some people dislike illustrations *cough* Charles Lamb *cough*. What do you make of Brock's depictions though? We have to admit, we're not quite sold on his Captain Wentworth, but what do you think of Anne and the other characters?

On Shakespeare and Growing Up

I reread The Tempest the other day. It has always been my favorite among Shakespeare's plays, and revisiting it now was like returning to an old and trusted friend... An old and trusted friend that had changed quite a lot in my absence. What I remembered most about it was how, when I first read the play, the ending struck me as rather somber and melancholy. As the elaborate and joyful masque he conjured for Miranda's wedding comes to an end, Prospero gives up his magic, reminding us that all life, too, shall in time fade away, like a distant and blurry dream. Or so my memory went. For what first jumped out to me this time around was how Prospero actually precedes his speech with an invitation to be cheerful:

You do look, my son, in a moved sort, 
As if you were dismay'd. Be cheerful, sir. 
Our revels are now ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-clapped tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Act IV, i, ln. 148-157                                                   

The elegiac note is still there, of course. Coming amid the celebration of the upcoming marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda - rich with symbols of fertility and abundance - Prospero's eloquent speech, connecting the now vanished play to life's impermanence, provides a sobering contrast. Just like the play that has ended, ripe with images of the harvest and filled with bright hope for the future, so too our life must one day end, its promise, “the cloud-clapped tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces…” and its very existence, “the great globe itself,” gone forever. Comparing our own lives to dreams serves not only to impart the fleeting, insubstantial quality of existence, but also to hint of death ("sleep") as life's final destination.

A 19th century illustration of the wedding masque

But while, when I first read the play, this was all I got from it, now I can also see the reason to be cheerful. It may seem bleak at first glance, but Prospero is actually renewed spiritually through this understanding of life’s impermanence. His speech can almost be seen as a kind of funeral address for his tenure on the island. It comes, quite appropriately, at the celebration of his daughter’s upcoming wedding. Miranda has been Prospero’s only cherished loved one. (He tenderly describes her as his preservation at one point, as “one third of my life”.) Through releasing Miranda, he allows her to pursue romantic love and embark in adult life, free from his tutelage and control. In another dramatic gesture signaling the end of his domination, Prospero also renounces his magic—the most visible symbol of his power and of his life on the island. 

And once he releases Ariel, Prospero has completely distanced himself from his former rule and authority over the island. Instead of domination, he is now ready to embrace mercy and forgiveness. He forgives the treacherous Antonio and Sebastian, and returns Caliban to his care even after his attempted betrayal. More importantly, he sets out for a life off of the island, returning to civilization and reclaiming his dukedom. I first read this as a fall from grace. I now see it as an evolution from domination to compassion. Prospero is reborn and renewed, ready to enter a fresh period of existence. He too, like Miranda, has the right to rejoice and exclaim, “O brave new world, that has such people in’t!”

I suppose that I am the one that has changed. When I was a teen, Prospero renouncing magic and declaring life short and fleeting seemed so sad. Now it mainly looks wise and admirable, even if a little bittersweet. The Tempest, however, is still one of my favorite plays and one of these days I will follow Prospero's example, take a break from my day job, graduate school, wedding planning and magic to write a more detailed review for it.

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)