by Paul Collins

It’s not much of an exaggeration at all for me to say that if Paul Collins happened to write a book about – say – the history of Seattle as recounted through its Yellow Pages, I’d immediately request it from my neighborhood library and probably spend the next few days doing nothing but reading it.  That is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that since I’ve thoroughly enjoyed everything that Collins has ever written, I’d follow him — literarily — everywhere.  I am happy to report that his newest offering is another must read: perfect for history buffs, Shakespeare fans, and anyone who enjoys learning – painlessly – about a slightly abstruse topic.

The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World (Bloomsbury, 2009) explores the fate of the collection of the Bard of Avon’s plays that was assembled and edited after his death by his fellow actors and friends John Heminge and Henry Condell. In describing the peregrinations of this collection of plays over the next 400 years, Collins introduces us to a wide assemblage of folks whose lives and interests, as readers, writers, or publishers, had an impact on the world of Shakespeareana. He describes the role of various editors and Shakespeare scholars in the history of the folio, including Samuel Johnson (who worked on an edition of the plays and evidently read even while he was eating), poet Alexander Pope, and Henry Clay Folger, the one-time president of Standard Oil of New York and great amasser of everything Shakespeare (and who, along with his wife, founded the Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. that bears his name). With wit and good will (ha!), not to mention an unabashed enthusiasm for his topic, Collins helps us understand the importance to the world of the First Folio, how publishing has changed (and not) since the 16^th century, and what’s known about the fate of the approximately 1,000 copies that were originally printed of Heminge and Condell’s manuscript.  Collins writes history the way you wish every historian did: accessible, interesting, and meaningful.  I interviewed Collins on my television show and was totally charmed.

A comendable project, I hope to see the documentary one day: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091031/ap_en_mo/us_dead_poets

If you’re not doing anything today, get thee to ye olde graveyard and extol praises worthy of the poet who lies below.

The Monsters rocked my socks off about a month ago.  I loaned it to Sonika when I visited her, so sadly I can’t give any quotes.  Well-researched and equally well-written, The Monsters is a captivating read for anyone interested in Frankenstein, Mary and Percy Shelley, or Lord Byron.  If you weren’t interested in these topics before, you might be by a quarter of the way through the book.  Oh, and if you’re interested in people who are in love with their half-siblings, this book could be for you.  Who knew those Victorians were so explicit in their letters to family members?

1. last time i drove/rode past this way
they were spring-wobbling calves
and now, full grown.
the magic is in the motion

2. cheese/snack commentary:
i think we are fancy people

3. fuck the gas station
let’s go to the ice cream parlor
licorice stains
darkening lola’s lips

4. siskiyou summit
highest elevation
along i-5
infamous sight of snowball fight

5. personal politcal history survey
through that scramble of years:
u-lock neck lock-downs
and consequent arrests
fur free fridays in november wisconsin chill
flyering every circus
in a town
whose football team
was named after
the meatpacking industry
the politics of paranoia and organizing

6. personal literary history review:
uwgb writers union
open mic at the concert cafe
writing workshops at dancing rabbit

7. guided by birds of prey
circling in stillness
8, maybe 12
sunlight filtering through spread feathers

8. smooth red bark
here we call them madrones
in canada, we call them arbutus

9. glorious moody tease
of pacific meets i-5
five minutes

10. laying down
another layer of me
over these
25 mph curves
us hwy 199

11. redwood trunks
at least 10 arm spans wide
i roll down window
to feel closer
chill air slipping in

12. i dreamed a highway back to you
lullaby of a song for someone’s sad time of day
enough of a shred of light
left to see
ink on page

People still find it really odd that I should be able to conduct research on literature. For great swathes of the population, research is something that happens in a laboratory and involves test tubes. By contrast, books are a form of entertainment, something to be read and enjoyed (or not, as the case may be) and put aside; what more could you possibly do with them? Well, just as a petri dish of bacteria, when placed under the microscope, reveals itself as a swarming community of endless variety, so, too, does a university department of literary critics. In fact, it’s amazing how many different things there are to do with books, and how passionately people will defend their own approach.

When I first arrived in Cambridge I recognized there were multiple categories of critic but they were united in being exclusive and intimidating. Some delighted in taking their little scalpels to the text and extracting patterns or internal contradictions most general readers would miss. Some wrote dense, obscure critiques packed with technical or philosophical jargon. Over time my eye became more discerning and I noticed that some had axes to grind, some hopped onto whatever bandwagon was currently passing, and some had been so completely seduced by a theory or a cause that every book they read was simply another glaring example of that exact same point they’d been trying to make. Of course what people say about a book rarely feels like a decision between choices; critics would be more likely to insist that they talk about what’s glaringly obvious and wonder rather indignantly how other readers could possibly have failed to notice it. No, the approach we take to reading develops on the dark side of the mind. Which is a shame because how we read has so much to say about who we are. I do remember one decision I made very consciously, however. I can distinctly recall growing very impatient with the kind of critical study in which the writer takes umbrage with some, often minor, point that another critic has made, and proceeds to spend the next 250 pages disemboweling that point, along with the critic who made it. It struck me as a form of intellectual antler-clashing, literature as a battlefield in which puffed-up egos competed for the flag, and I had no interest in it. I felt, and still feel, it’s a waste of perfectly good creative energy.

But critical overkill is a very popular approach still to writing about books. Only recently did I put two and two together and realize that it was in fact one of the original approaches to writing about books, back in the 1920s and 30s when the study of English literature not only emerged as a respected discipline but forged ahead of the field as the vanguard of civilization itself, and thus morally superior to law, science, philosophy or history. You may have heard of a man called F. R. Leavis. He taught at Cambridge and was deeply involved in boosting the popularity and the perceived value of studying literature. He made a big and lasting fuss about two things: 1) close reading was the essential skill when it came to writing about books and 2) there was a distinct canon of authors good enough to study and vast tracts of literary darkness where there were only monsters. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence made the cut, and not much else. He called it the Great Tradition, in the manner of all great traditions begun yesterday but insisted upon with belligerent determination. Furthermore, Leavis edited an important literary magazine entitled Scrutiny, published prolifically, and produced a curriculum for teaching that was so stringent and rigorous that many schoolmasters across the country adopted it, thus spreading Leavis’s preachings far and wide. He had tremendous influence and was instrumental in shaping the study of English literature for many decades to come.

He was also a living nightmare of hostility; he argued with everyone, dissenters and disciples alike. His aggression assumed titanic proportions but was often expended on the pettiest disputes. This was essentially because he was so dogmatic; he brooked no opposition, and yet his judgements were sweeping to say the least: ‘Except for Shakespeare, the Elizabethans don’t matter’ his lecture notes read. ‘The Prophetic Books [by Blake] a disaster. Nothing in them.’ So crude and unjustified a dismissal can hardly warrant the name of criticism, and yet these were edicts for Leavis, and if you didn’t agree with him, you were against him and in for an extremely unpleasant time. Authors, books, other critics, were so many skittles lined up and waiting for the bowling ball of Leavis’s criticism to mow them down, but the one person who escaped all analysis was Leavis himself. He fell completely beyond the arc of his waspish brain and acid tongue and so he seemed utterly confused by the reception he sometimes got. It took twenty years before Cambridge University actually gave him a lectureship, a fact that left Leavis baffled and embittered rather than regretting the disputes he had scattered in his wake and that had cost him a number of teaching jobs. As he grew older, paranoia inevitably took its toll, and the true underlying nature of Leavis’s vituperation became apparent in the later writings in which he was simply unhinged and unreadable. Once the insight had been lost, only the relentless aggression remained.

The spirit of Leavis lingers on in Cambridge, but my response to it has changed radically over the years. I ceased to find grumpy critics intimidating and discovered instead a reflex reaction of pity and distaste. They seem to stand for all I think is wrong with writing about literature, arbitrary disputes laced with hysteria, the creation of pointless ghettos, self-righteous sneering thinly disguised as intellectual superiority, tantrums about issues so unimportant in the global scale of things that I start to wonder myself about the point of what we do. But looking back at Leavis’s life, it’s actually easy to see what the histrionics gained him. Before he came along, the study of literature was in the hands of aristocratic dilettantes, and it was a mushy, unimpressive sort of intellectual discipline. Leavis came from a very different class to those old men of letters; he came from a social stratum of grafters and fighters, where you had to push for what you wanted and keep an eye out for all the people who would bring you down. By picking fights over what literary studies ought to be, he not only drew attention to those studies, he started to get people hot under the collar about them. For instance, if I said to you that your liking for Virginia Woolf showed poor taste, that she was a pointless and puerile writer without a shred of worth in her novels, that she mangled English syntax and had no interest in any of the important issues of her time, you might well be offended. Not to mention defensive of poor old Virginia. In fact, if you had any feelings in the matter at all, it wouldn’t be long before you were hastening to the shelf to fetch your copy of Mrs Dalloway and flicking through to the scenes where Woolf advocates powerfully for the victims of shell-shock, or blowing the dust off Orlando to prove that she was interested in gender politics. If I told you, as Leavis argued, that your moral worth could be gauged by the sensitivity of your literary responses, and that together we were protecting society from its barbaric elements by celebrating the glory of literature, then the stakes of any little dispute would rise sky high.

I don’t think for a moment that Leavis consciously calculated the effect he had. He suffered terribly from shellshock after the First World War, in which he was a medical orderly, and the experience both destroyed part of his character and elevated literature in his mind to the role of saviour. Like so many sensitive people who feel the horrifying approach of madness, I think he kept himself sane by turning that creeping negativity outwards. But he did confuse literature with religion, and made his studies into a sect and his students into disciples. What fell outside the reach of his teachings was inevitably heresy and those who disagreed with him were instantly excommunicated. It’s hard to distinguish the work of spirituality in such circumstances from the baser quest for power. And power-mongering, while it may make critics feel special, is also what keeps them isolated, embattled and friendless, as the case of Leavis so comprehensively showed.

Several years ago now, at an open day lunch for sixth formers, my colleague and friend in modern languages came rushing over to me and grabbed my arm for support.

‘I had to get away,’ she gasped. ‘I was talking to this young man, who seemed quite charming and so smart. So I asked him what he liked most about reading, and he said, “I’m not particularly interested in what happens in a book, but I love watching the way the words are placed on the page. I could do that forever.” I couldn’t believe it,’ she protested. ‘You have a splendid work of literature in your hands and all you care about is the organization of the verbs?’

It’s funny the way that linguists and linguisticians often get lumped together when their interests are such worlds apart. Students of linguistics are on the science end of the languages spectrum, and such is their adoration of the subject that it comes as no surprise to them that the words ‘grammar’ and ‘glamour’ are joined at their semantic root. I suspect you may just have to be born a linguistician to understand the obsession, that it involves a particular fandango of the DNA. One lad came for interview bearing a cherished leisure project, a book the size and shape of a telephone directory that contained a series of sentences and their variations, translated into an astonishing range of languages and coded in a rainbow spectrum of coloured inks. Naturally we accepted him and he went on to get a First class degree; you can’t quibble with that level of passion. But if you’re the kind of person who gets a kick out of plot and character, it can be bewildering to come face to face with those for whom it is a pleasant irrelevance. I can’t understand the fascination with language at that level, but I can respect it, because some extraordinary sea changes in academia have developed out of a subject I think of as anal, dry and hopelessly dull.

It was a linguistician, way back at the start of the twentieth century, who made a huge difference to the study of the arts, but what I’m really interested in talking about in this post, is the fact that he never had any inkling of what he’d done. Ferdinand de Saussure was a quiet Swiss gentleman, a passionate linguistician, and a dutiful academic. But we know little more about him than this because he led such an uneventful and unremarkable life. Saussure displayed unusual qualities for an epoch-making thinker: he was always in touch with humility and self-doubt and he had no interest whatsoever in publicity. In the biggest paradox of all, the important book of his work that motivated a huge movement of intellectual change was actually written in his name, after his death, by other people.

So here’s what happened: the young Saussure was a precociously gifted linguist who, by the age of 15, had learned French, German, English, Latin and Greek. Already he was working on a ‘general system of language’ but when he went to university he followed in his family’s footsteps and enrolled on courses in physics and chemistry. It didn’t take long for him to figure out his mistake, and he ditched the sciences, headed off to Leipzig in Germany, and at 21 published a work of thrilling youthful exuberance, entitled Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Languages. Oddly enough this has never ended up on my bookshelf, but apparently it was deemed pretty fantastic by those in the know. He followed this up a couple of years later with a compelling doctoral thesis on the use of the genitive case in Sanskrit. I’m sorry, I do apologize to people out there who read that and think ‘how intolerably fascinating!’ It just seems to me faintly incredible, like an interest in the sport of extreme ironing. Saussure went on to wow them in Paris with his classes on Gothic and Old High German and Indo-European philology, and then he took a job back home in Geneva and things started to slow down for him. He married, fathered sons, and settled for a provincial backwater where he failed to capitalize on his early promise, not least in his inability to put a work together for publication. In truth, Saussure felt demoralized and full of self-doubt. He was overwhelmed by the need to start the study of linguistics over again, stripping away all the old orthodox thought and creating a fresh terminology, a completely different approach. The scale of the work daunted him, and he buckled under it.

Then, in 1906, when another professor at the university retired, he was assigned the teaching of general linguistics. Saussure didn’t much fancy the job, but he did it because he felt it was his duty. Thenceforth, in alternate years, he delivered the series of lectures that would make his name, though he never knew it. He fell ill in the summer of 1912 and died in February 1913, aged 56. It was his students who decided that his work deserved to be consolidated and preserved; Bally and Sechehaye, in collaboration with other students and colleagues, got all their old lecture notes together and recreated Saussure’s theories. The mere thought of my students compiling their notes from my lectures into a book and claiming it as a representation of my thought makes me shudder with horror – accuracy is not their watchword. But then again, linguisticians do take the study of detail to a whole other level, so perhaps it’s the only subject in which such a strategy could be plausible. The three series of lectures were synthesized into one, the book was published, and the rest, as they say, is history.

You don’t really want to know what he said, do you? Well, look, I’ll do a brief summary, but feel free to skip. Saussure recognized that language is made up of what he called ‘signs’, which are combinations of things or concepts and the words and sounds used to designate them. But he pointed out that the link between word and object is wholly arbitrary. There’s no fundamental reason why I should call this thing I’m sitting on a chair, for instance. The only reason language holds together is that it marks a social convention – we all agreed a while back that ‘chair’ was a good enough designation and it still holds. However, if enough time passes, it’s quite possible that the designation will change; some bright spark will come up with a new word, and it’ll stick, and the meaning of ‘chair’ will shift. The word ‘silly’ for instance, used to mean ‘happy, blessed and pious’, not foolish or even stupid. Equally, while the English language might make certain distinctions, for instance, between rivers and streams, other languages will wish to make different ones. In French, the distinction is not in size, but whether the body of water runs into the sea (fleuve) or not (rivière). So, what comes out of all of this is the recognition that languages are living, dynamic systems, constantly shifting and changing and created by arbitrary but widespread social conventions. If, however, at any one time you cut a slice through a language, you can see that it works by the relationships between its finite set of words. I know what ‘chair’ means because it isn’t ‘charm’ or ‘chin’ or ‘share’ or any other near miss. I know what ‘silly’ means because it isn’t ‘pitiful’ or ‘innocent’ or ‘sweet’. A good way to think of it is by means of the system of colours. We understand what blue is, because it’s not green or yellow or brown. And yes, that’s cultural too: English understands ‘light blue’ and ‘dark blue’ to be shades of a single colour, whereas in Russian they are considered to be two distinct primary colours.

It was the idea of system and structure that really took hold, and the concept of negative difference – the idea that things mean something because they don’t mean something else. It influenced the study of anthropology, of psychoanalysis, of philosophy, of literary study. The repercussions for the understanding of language were striking. Language had always been seen as a tool, something that we could bend to our will. Now that it was understood as a self-enclosed finite system, it was evident that we had to bend our desires to what it was capable of saying. Rather than controlling it, as we fondly supposed, language was in fact highly influential in forming us, in carving up the world and telling us how to view it. It was a shocking thought, but one that academics in various disciplines ran with, often to surprising ends.

Not bad for a man working in the dullest field of study conceivable and who himself wrote ‘I am fed up with all that, and with the general difficulty of writing even ten lines of good sense on linguistic matters.’ And it just goes to show that there is no orthodox trajectory towards making a significant difference. When your career looks like it’s heading down the pan, when you’re at your lowest ebb and heavy with doubt, that’s the time when the really important stuff may just be happening.

Today is a big day for literature history!

The much-celebrated English romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley was born, in 1792. Later in life, Shelley married Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, (incidentally covered in our blog a few posts ago!), also known as the famed author, Mary Shelley. At the height of his career, Percy Shelley churned out a number of major poems, plays and even Gothic novels. He had such a massive impact upon the literary world that years later, even Ghandi proved this influence when he chose to read from Shelley’s political poem “The Masque of Anarchy” at demonstrations.  Head over to infloox for a more in-depth look.

Fast forward to 1944: Also on August 4th, on a much more sobering note, 15-year-old Anne Frank was captured by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp. However, her precious diaries became her legacy, giving the entire world an intimately personal peek into life as a Jew during the war.  Upon its publication by her father in 1947, The Diary of Anne Frank became an instant bestseller.

After reading D.G. Myers and the Little Professor on the timeliness of literary history, especially in light of Mark Bauerlein’s discussion of the “diminishing returns” of literary criticism as performance, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way literary scholars read each other’s books.  And one of the things that struck me was the (obvious?) fact that scholars routinely read literary histories about books we’ve never read before, because we want to learn more about them, and possibly read them ourselves.  Not so, I suspect, with the conventional close readings of literary critical monographs, which I’m assuming are pretty well useless with authors or works we are unfamiliar with or uninterested in.  Am I wrong about this?  Because my intuition tells me that close-reading monographs are books that are only useful for those who are already committed to the value and interest of the works studied.  And this might account for the decline of such single author books, in the absence of a clear consensus about which books to focus on.

Although I usually disagree with Bauerlein, I think he has a point about the overproduction of literary criticism, and think that LP and Myers are probably correct to focus on literary history.  (That’s why I’m writing one myself)  But while I was mulling over this, I realized that I’d just read an entire series of exchanges on EMOB and on this blog about the allure of “machine reading” books for literary criticism.   And I myself get nervous about being led through a huge database without reading everything myself, and allowing the machine to do the searching for me.  But then I realized that we often read literary histories for exactly this kind of searching/sorting through of possible leads for our own research.  So why not use such “finding aids,” especially when we have an entire category of scholarship devoted to producing such “aids”?  Or is this too deflating a description of our own scholarship?

DM

Many of us who grew up in the late 40s – early 50s had our Jane Austen force-fed to us in high school (unless we were fortunate enough to be blessed with an Austen-loving mother or father!).  Pride & Prejudice was the standard text with little reference to the other works; followed by George Eliot’s Silas Marner, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and / or Great Expectations, Shakespeare (hopefully!), and Hemingway, Steinbeck, Salinger for contemporary authors.  But I’ve often thought that Austen got a bum-rap with this “required-reading” status, the educational system’s way of compensating for what an early critic said in calling Austen “a critic’s novelist – highly spoken of and little read.” [p. 120]  And while I am the first to admit that Austen is not for everyone [their terrible loss!], I have long believed that this approach to Austen added to her suffering from the great reader-turnoff. 

For me, a voracious reader as a youngster and teenager, I went on to read some of her novels, but alas! not all, feeling more at home with Alcott, the Brontes, Dickens, and later Wilkie Collins, all those more accessible Victorian novelists.  So it was in later life that I returned to Austen – and I perhaps needed that distance of time (and some wisdom!) to re-appreciate her brilliance – the humor and irony, the language, that characterization, and of course, the age-old love stories.  So from my current vantage point I marvel at Austen’s ability to stay fresh, to speak to different generations, and to speak to each individual in different ways through one’s own life. And in these fifteen plus years of “re-Austenising” myself, I’ve gone much beyond the novels, to the biographies, criticism, her Regency / Georgian world, and the current surfeit of films, and sequels and continuations, and even the latest parodies, creating quite a book collection in the process – and I have really barely begun!  

So I was most excited to hear about the release of Claire Harman’s new book, Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World [Canongate, 2009], stirring up controversy even before it hit the bookstores [see my previous post, “Discord in Austen Land”].  [Harman has authored Fanny Burney: A Biography (Knopf, 2001) and works on Sylvia Townsend Warner and Robert Louis Stevenson].   It is an engaging read – historical, biographical, critical and anecdotal, all rolled into a capsule of Austen’s claim to fame – and just why was she so popular?  “the public whipped into a frenzy” [p. 243]  in the late nineteenth century and again in the late twentieth? – by “[James Edward] Austen-Leigh’s Memoir in the first instance, and in the second, a man in a wet shirt” [p. 243] [with thanks to Colin Firth!] – simplified reasoning perhaps, but a good chuckle and that glimmer of truth. 

Harman explains that

…this book charts the growth of Austen’s fame, the changing status of her work and what it has stood for, or been made to stand for, in English culture over the past two-hundred years.  In the foreground is the story of Austen’s authorship, one of persistence, accident, advocacy, and sometimes surprising neglect.  Not only did Austen publish her books anonymously and enjoy very little success during her lifetime, but publication itself only came very late, after twenty years of unrewarded labor.  I have sought to reconstruct these pre-fame years in the spirit of uncertainty through which Austen lived them.  Her prized irony and famous manipulation of tone I believe owes much to it; part of the reason why she pleases us so much now is that she was, for years, pleasing only herself.  [p. 7-8]

Thus, Harman starts by placing Austen squarely in the context of her times – her family and friends as writers - her mother, brothers James and Henry, her friend Anne Lefroy’s brother Samuel Egerton Brydges, and her pride in her own quite delightful juvenile writings.  Incorporating a general account of Austen’s life [Harman assumes the reader brings much knowledge of Austen’s life and gives only a cursory telling], she presents us with a great summary of Austen’s writings, the publication history and early responses to each work, drawing heavily on Brian Southam’s Jane Austen, The Critical Heritage [London 1968], and emphasizing Austen’s literary ambitions. [for more on this, see Jan Fergus’s The Professional Woman Writer” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, one of the earlier scholarly arguments to clearly see Austen in this light, far removed from the portrait painted by her brother Henry and later her nephew.]

Following Austen’s death in 1817, her copyrights still owned by Cassandra were sold to Richard Bentley and his issue of all six novels in 1833 did much to keep Austen in print; but her popularity waned, the rise of the Victorian novel sending Austen to the shadows, not to mention Charlotte Bronte’s dislike of Austen, quoted by Elizabeth Gaskell in her Bronte biography in 1857 [but ironically, how close is Gaskell’s North & South to Pride & Prejudice!]  So Austen remained largely unread until the Austen-Leigh Memoir of 1870, followed by various new editions of the novels and the selected letters in 1890. 

Harman explores in her chapter on the “Divine Jane” [quoting W.D. Howells] the publishing of these new editions and the illustrated versions that sought to “fix the characters in one’s mind” [p.159], the biographies, and critical analyses in this first burgeoning fame-fest, and her new status as darling of the intellectual snobbish-elite, championed by the likes of Leslie Stephen, Henry James, George Saintsbury, and Howells [and of course, not to leave out Mark Twain’s adamant dislike!] – all this culminating in R.W. Chapman’s Oxford edition of her works in 1923, “the first complete scholarly edition of any English novelist.” [p. 192]. 

In “Canon and Canonisation,” Harman chronicles the scholarly critical analysis that continues unabated to the present – the vast extent of academic and non-academic writing – on the one hand, Austen as a pleasure-read, the writer “who wrote so clearly and simply, and who was so small scale” [p. 200] – and on the other, the critical study of Austen’s “unconsciousness and brilliance” and here we see her “easy passage into English literature courses” [p. 201].  Austen makes critical literary history as manuscripts and contemporary memoirs became available for study – resulting in library collections, various illustrated editions, Jane Austen Societies, interest in her “homes and haunts,” more biographies from various standpoints, new paths of criticism taking into account the political, sociological and historical elements, and the many works on the manners and mores, fashion and handiwork, cookery and letter-writing – all things Austen indeed! [A friend visiting my home recently asked me what could all these Austen-related books on my shelves possibly be about when she only wrote six books!] 

And finally to film and what she terms “Jane Austen TM”, Harman again summarizing all that came before the “wet shirt” and after – the movies, the sequels, the internet and YouTube concoctions, the blogsphere , the Societies, the fan-fiction sites, the costume-driven fanatics, etc.  And Harman ends with the question, “What would Austen have made of all this? [p. 278] – in answer, she cites the differing views of D.W. Harding, Lionel Trilling, Henry James, and E.M. Forster to prove to us that “the significance of Jane Austen is so personal and so universal, so intimately connected with our sense of ourselves and of our whole society, that it is impossible to imagine a time when she or her works could have delighted us long enough.” [p. 281]

 One of the criticisms of Harman’s book has been her light non-academic approach to Austen [and perhaps her re-working of others’ ideas into this “popular” framework] – but it all works so well for what and for whom it is intended.  Harman’s gift is taking an inordinate amount of primary and secondary material and presenting it into a very readable, information-packed and anecdotal whole – everything you would ever want to know about Jane Austen all put together in a neat little package of 342 pages.  This of course may be its greatest shortcoming – too neat a package with strong authorial opinions thrown in [and a feeling to this reader of all being rather rushed at the end - "let's wrap this up, throw in a few final tales and get it published" sort of feeling...] –  it must needs be leaving something out! [Indeed, the 2005 Pride & Prejudice barely gets a mention, either an oversight or the expression of the author’s opinion of that film – but no matter what your views of that adaptation might be, it has to be praised for bringing Jane Austen and P&P  to yet another generation who do not find Colin Firth’s wet shirt scene all that WE make it out to be – and thus it is a clear topic for Jane’s current and ongoing “fame.”] 

But as a resource, with a terrific reading list to be gleaned from the text and bibliography [though I do quibble with the number of un-sourced quotations and overly shortened citations that are unclear (especially in regard to the letters – a number and date would have been most helpful!)], Jane’s Fame should be required reading [not force-fed please…] for anyone interested in the facts of Austen’s writing life and how she has risen to such heights and commands such a presence in so many people’s lives.  And you will likely take away new and interesting tidbits such as finding what Katherine Mansfield had to say about Emma:  “Mr. Knightley in the shrubbery would be something!” [p. 247] [aah! indeed!]

4 1/2 full inkwells [out of 5]

 Further Reading: [all page citations above are to Janes' Fame]

• See my post on the various Reviews of Jane’s Fame
• Copeland, Edward, Juliet McMaster, eds.  The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen.  Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Fergus, Jan.  “The Professional Woman Writer” in The Cambridge Companion, pp. 12-31, where Fergus summarizes and expands these arguments first presented in her Jane Austen: A Literary Life. London: Macmillan 1991.  These are must-reads…
• Sutherland, Kathryn.  Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: from Aeschylus to Bollywood. Oxford, 2005, pb 2007.  Note that it is Professor Sutherland who started the controversy that Harman essentially lifted her ideas – I have this book and have skimmed it only, so cannot comment fully – but just looking at the table of contents, one finds the similarities a little alarming, and the Sutherland book has far more depth to the notes and bibliography – but again, I emphasize the “popular” nature of Harman’s book. 
• Todd, Janet, ed.  Jane Austen in Context.  Cambridge University Press, 2005, 2007 with corrections. 
• Claire Harman’s website with cites to reviews of Jane’s Fame
• Austenblog:  Mag’s review of Jane’s Fame

Posted by Deb

["Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of French Heroes"
1802 by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson; image from Bits of News]

I suppose I’m one of the few people who could spend a week researching eighteenth-century writers in Scotland, and come home and feel fired up to write a series of posts about Hans Gumbrecht’s book on 1926.  But that’s how it worked out.  I actually have a few more thoughts about Gumbrecht and temporality that I might try out at some point, but more on that some other time.

I’ve been thinking about Ossian for a while, though, and have been trying to come to terms with teaching “him,” since I’m beginning to feel that Ossianic epic is the third leg of the stool, when we’re talking about literary culture in late 18c Scotland (the other two legs being Mackenzie-style anglophilia in prose, and the emerging scots vernacular in Fergusson’s poetry).  (And if others have additional legs, er, suggestions, I’d welcome hearing about them)

In fact, I’d had some weird moments teaching Ossian last term, because my students picked up on the fact that at some level the whole Ossian phenomenon embarasses me, probably because I respond to it all too easily.

The fraudulence and bluster of Macpherson, the overcompensation in the Scots’ martial fantasies, the funny names, the entire package makes me uncomfortably aware of, uh, the hours I spent in junior high and high school, listening to dreamy-sounding prog-rock bands, looking at Roger Dean posters,  and reading Tolkein.  To me, the whole thing is an amusement-park ride of vulnerable teenage guy  melancholic fantasy.  Except that historically  it wasn’t:  it captivated and persisted in Scottish and European literary culture for decades, traveled all over the world, inspired writers on the order of Blake and Goethe. In the meantime, its “translator”  Macpherson was left behind to enjoy a splendid lifestyle and an annihilated public reputation.

So Ossian represents a series of texts whose value has fluctuated widely over the years, while I myself have never been able to make up my mind about its actual quality.  What’s more, the whole pathetic story of Macpherson’s truncated career, told very well in Buchan’s Crowded with Genius, gives me a bad case of Imposter-syndrome anxiety, and puts me in mind of the relation of parasite to host: Ossian simply incubated in the body of James Macpherson, and flew away when it was done.

For me, the whole story of Ossian’s origins in authorial fraud, its uncritical reception by the most authoritative  Scots critics (Blair etc.), and then its abandonment of its creator, seems to summon up a worst-case scenario of literature and all its institutions and instruments of validation, so that author, critic, and audience all seem to be equally discredited by the tale.  And yet something of it persists, ghostlike, to continue embarassing the pretensions of literary critics and literary history, for some time to come.

DM

The Literary Encyclopedia

The Literary Encyclopedia is a growing reference work compiled by international scholars and dedicated to literature originally written in English or translated into English. It contains thousands of detailed author profiles as well as information on literary genres and individual works, all of which are set in their historical and cultural context.

Many years ago, when I was a newly-minted undergraduate, way out of my depth at Cambridge University, I was given a play called Danton’s Tod by Georg Büchner to read. The name Büchner won’t mean a lot to most people, although some might have heard of the opera Woyzeck, which was adapted from another of his works. Büchner was a curious anachronism, an early nineteenth-century writer almost supernaturally ahead of his time. He didn’t write very much because he died of typhus at the age of 23, and what he left behind was ignored for another fifty years because no one could understand it. I had a lot of sympathy for the doubters when I was a callow youth of eighteen. The play left me cold, it was so far out of my own registers of comprehension, and I made the terrible error of suggesting that Büchner’s inability to please the audience (me) might have stemmed from his immaturity. And thus I learned the hard way, from the red ink and exclamation marks on my essay when it was handed back, that such value judgements were not the province of ignorant first year undergraduates. It didn’t help that I was mortally terrified of the supervisor who was teaching me German literature. He used to sit with a single spotlight shining over his shoulder that glinted on the steel rim of his glasses before dazzling my eyes, and if you weren’t smart he couldn’t be bothered with you. I spent the first year watching his attempts to restrain himself from heaving great sighs of distress at my mindless remarks, but all he ever said was ‘I think you’ve missed the point.’ I have been allergic ever since to the kind of literary criticism that spends all its time proving that other people have missed the point.

Anyhow, time passed, I learned a thing or two, and in my final year Georg Büchner turned up again. In fact, Danton’s Tod and the same supervisor turned up again, but much was different now. I had overcome my old terrors of him thanks to my friend, Mel. ‘He’s only human!’ she used to berate me. ‘Imagine him in his underpants!’ If I have always taken great care to be sympathetic with students in my own time teaching them, it must partly have been motivated by the desire to avoid such measures being taken. But it did work. Alas, struggle as I might with the great Büchner, I still couldn’t manage to produce an essay that really satisfied this supervisor, and I would probably have consigned old Georg to the dustbin of history if I hadn’t come across a small novella written by him, entitled Lenz. It was a mere 50 pages of prose, but what prose it was. I was completely, utterly blown away. Lenz shot up my internal bestseller list and remained there for many years, until my ability to read in German slowly gathered dust and rusted away. Everything passes, the good, the bad, the indifferent. I had all but forgotten about it, until I saw that Oneworld Classics had published a new edition, which in a fit of nostalgia I immediately ordered. When it came last week, I couldn’t resist reading it right away; what can I say? It had made such an impact on me back then, and it was with the most profound satisfaction that I made my way slowly, carefully, through its pages. It was every bit as remarkable as I remembered.

So, Lenz. Büchner wrote it about 1836, a year or so before his death. It was based on the real life playwright, Jacob Lenz, who was born in 1751; one of those febrile, over-intelligent young men who studied theology in lukewarm fashion whilst really worshipping at the altar of literature. He left college to become a private tutor to two young boys, and it was whilst traveling with this family that he met Goethe. Goethe, we were always told, was the German equivalent of Shakespeare, and he was quite a character in himself, still I will save his story for another day. Apart, that is, from one small element of it. Goethe, whilst on an extended stay with friends in the country, fell in love with the pretty daughter of the local pastor and dallied rather mercilessly with her heart. Her name was Friederike Brion, and he wrote her verses and letters and generally made all the moves of courtship. I was particularly tickled to read that in order to impress her, he extended his eyebrows with a burnt cork (early kohl, one assumes) so that they met in the middle, in the hopes of presenting a more devilish air. How marvellous: a historical era in which the monobrow was in fashion. Anyhow. The whole affair became a bit too hot for Goethe to handle; marriage really wasn’t on his agenda and he only proposed once in his life, at the age of 74. So, rather shamefaced, Goethe broke it off, and broke Friederike’s heart. Now, having heard this gossip on the grapevine, Lenz came along and started to befriend Friederike himself. Whether he did or didn’t make her love him, on the rebound from Goethe, remains lost to the mists of time. Lenz liked to claim he did, but the madness that was going to overwhelm him shortly was already starting to show. In any case he wrote her beautiful poems, confusing many a literary historian, as they were often attributed to Goethe. In some ways it’s not unreasonable to think this: Lenz was interested in Friederike because of Goethe, the point was not the girl, but the occupation of a privileged persona, the shadowing of a man whose literary talents were already gaining a reputation, an imaginative leap into the outline of someone he wanted to be: talented, wealthy, famous, sane.

Friederike Brion didn’t really want Lenz and she sent him on his way. Many decades later, Goethe would immortalize her pastoral beauty in one of his works and she became an ideal of femininity. In fact she still lived at that point, poor, unmarried and abandoned to obscurity. Lenz went away and turned irrevocably mad. I always felt the story of this trio was a fabulous one and in those days, when I still liked the idea of writing novels, I longed to fictionalize their love triangle. But really what I wanted to do, if I could have done it, was to write Lenz again. Büchner’s novella picks up with our hero shortly after the Friederike episode when Lenz is losing himself to insanity. It is written in the third person, but from a perspective so close to Lenz, so tightly aligned to his perceptions, that the reader is dragged into the maelstrom of mental instability whilst still maintaining one foot in the solid, exquisitely written world of the story. It’s an extraordinary point of view, and one that would not be reproduced until modernism came along. Drawing on accurate biographical material, Büchner shows Lenz retreating to the mountains to live with a gentle pastor’s family. Oberlin represents Lenz’s only hope of regaining his health, in the quiet goodness that he casts over those who surround him. For a while, Lenz calms. And then another crisis hits. On a night when Oberlin is away, Lenz hears about a young child, coincidentally named Friederike, who is dying. Lenz knows he shouldn’t, but the force of magnetic attraction is too strong, and he rushes to her bedside. When he arrives, the child has already died, but that doesn’t prevent Lenz from making a humiliating, hopeless attempt to bring her back to life by the sheer power of invocation, pleading with God for a miracle. Inevitably, he is doomed to failure, and this setback puts him on the route to suicide.

It doesn’t sound much fun, does it? Well, no, and the writing is so fierce and anguished that I felt myself clinging onto my twenty-first century reality as I read each compelling page. But it is so well done, so sublime, in the old sense of awe and terror mixed. Here’s Lenz in full nutcase mode, out on the mountainside at night: ‘Clouds were passing swiftly across the moon; now all was in darkness, now the nebulous, vanishing landscape was revealed in the moonlight. He ran up and down. In his breast hell was rehearsing a song of triumph. The wind sounded like the singing of Titans. He felt capable of clenching an enormous fist, thrusting it up into heaven, seizing God and dragging Him through His clouds’. Or here again:  ‘In order to rid himself of his immeasurable torment he had clung anxiously to every person and thing around him. At certain moments it was clear to him that he was merely deceiving himself: he treated himself like a sick child. Some thoughts, some violent emotions he could not ward off without intense anxiety; then again he would suddenly be driven back to them with boundless urgency, he would tremble, his hair almost on end, until the enormous tension left him exhausted.’ To think that this was written back in 1836 is quite incredible, and Büchner leaves us with a psychiatric portrait more worthy of the modern age. But it is also an exercise in rollercoaster ride literature, a vivid and devastating account of a mind headed over the edge, and yet containing the cold acuity of a writer like Bernhard. It’s a little literary oddity, but also a small gem. I was glad to find it in my undergraduate days and even more glad to be reunited with it now.

The reviews are in on Claire Harman’s Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World [Canongate, 2009]

I list several of them for your perusal.  [I am fortunate indeed to have just been in the UK - I went into every Waterstone's I came across until finally the date of release arrived and a very helpful shop-keeper found it sitting on a to-be-shelved cart!  - so I am almost finished and will post my thoughts shortly...]

The Telegraph, by Frances Wilson

The Independent, by Elspeth Barker

Times Online, by John Carey

The Guardian, by Kathryn Hughes

The Spectator Book Club, by Philip Hensher

The Literary Review, by Mark Bostridge

A preview of the book at Austenprose

My previous post at JAIV about the Jane’s Fame controversy

I managed to mess up my book reading schedule and haven’t read Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl for the Slaves of Golconda group. Instead, I thought I’d offer some background information on Zweig himself. He is a little-known author these days, although when he was alive and at the height of his fame, he had to barricade himself in his house at Salzburg to keep his legion of fans at bay. His books were translated across the world, although he was better known for his biographical writings (on Erasmus, Balzac, Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots, Kleist, Tolstoy, Dickens) than his fiction. He was also a friend of any number of famous cultural figures, including Freud and Rilke – after a conversation with Rilke he wrote ‘one is incapable of any vulgarity for hours or even days’. This excitable, idealistic Zweig is much in evidence in his youth. As the rich second son of a millionaire textile manufacturer, he was able to devote himself to the causes that interested him, and art was the guiding star of his life. He had joined with a group of aesthetes in Austria during his teenage years and was devoted not just to the concept of art but to a vague, if stirring, political belief in a united, harmonious Europe. He declared himself not Austrian, but a European, and in this optimistic frame of mind reported that ‘The world offered itself to me as a fruit, beautiful and rich with promise.’ It seems scarcely conceivable that less than thirty years later, he and his second wife would die in a joint suicide pact.

Part of the problem – although by no means all of it – was that Zweig was Jewish. Initially he didn’t think this counted for anything. His family was not religious, but they were prosperous, educated and assimilated. His memory of his youth was entirely free from anti-Semitic slight; indeed his race was something that he entirely discounted. Not that he was ignorant of the Jewish question, rather he dissociated himself from the Ostjuden, the Eastern Jews who were migrating from a hostile Russia into what would eventually become an even more dangerous Western Europe. Such distinctions were not destined to last. By 1933 the Nazis were burning his books, in 1935 an opera by Richard Strauss, The Silent Woman, was closed down after only two performances because Zweig had written the libretto. In 1938, the Nazis destroyed his library in Salzburg, but by that point, Zweig had been driven into exile in London. He had begun to believe that Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was directed at him personally and he never really recovered from this paranoia.

But other discontents were stirring. It was in the thirties that his 20-year marriage to one of his fans, Friderike (they met through the letters that she wrote to him), broke down when he fell in love with his new secretary, Charlotte Altmann, who was a clichéd twenty-seven years younger. In her biography, Friderike explained how Zweig longed for space and for silence to create, something that her two children and her sociable lifestyle prevented him from enjoying. Zweig begged for a divorce on the grounds that he wanted to regain his ‘student’s freedom’, although within the year he had married Lotte. It might have been peace that Zweig was after, but given the brief interlude between this point and his suicide, peace regained clearly didn’t hit the spot. Instead it might be a blissful return to a former point in time that really appealed, nostalgia for his student days confused with a longing for a youthful, optimistic state of mind that he could no longer summon up. It would not be the first time that a man, feeling something had turned inexorably sour in his life, decided that a change of woman might provide the answer.

If it wasn’t love that went wrong on Zweig, if that was a smokescreen for a deeper discontent, we might look instead to the strongest guiding force in Zweig’s life, which was his belief in humanism. Humanism is a kind of moral philosophy, a perspective on life that affirms the dignity and worth of all people and the supreme belief in human intelligence as the source of all solutions to the problems that beset mankind. It proposes the need for a universal morality that would guide and inform all human conduct, but chooses not to trust to the supernatural or the spiritual for answers. The ultimate goal of humanism is to make life better for all individuals, but it doesn’t necessarily believe that is easily achieved; instead it looks to the community to work together to provide support and sustenance.

There is something beautiful and idealistic and almost noble about the humanistic stance. It’s also managed to be the dominant moral philosophy in the Western world between the Renaissance and, oh around about the end of World War II. All those years, people believed they held the key to the good life in their hearts, if they looked carefully enough. They believed as well that life was continually getting better, and that eventually, man would reach a state of perfection. Humanism was also deeply bound up with culture and the arts, the finest expression of humanist knowledge. Humanism had its problems, undoubtedly, not least of which was that this was a philosophy created by, held by and explored by men; half the world was rigorously excluded from its all-encompassing claims. But there is a nobility to it that our modern day philosophies lack. Now we’re in the era of post-humanism – the belief that the answers to all our problems lie beyond the human domain, in the world of technology and science. We’ve given up on ourselves as the agents of our own rescue.

Stefan Zweig believed in civilization – that beautiful faith in intelligence and artistic understanding to promote harmony, insight, communal well-being. He believed that there was a natural understanding between people of similar education and ability. He was thrilled to be part of an intricately interconnected group of artists whose mutual acclaim he assumed to be second nature. We might call him naïve, as much artistic achievement was ever fueled by jealousy, rivalry and enmity. But there is a fragility that Zweig always identified in his fictional characters as well as his biographical ones, a recognition that civilization might not always be the solution, that one might be too nice, too charming, too civilized for one’s own good. It provided the real spike of interest in his work, but it may also have tormented him in reality. The jury is out as to why Zweig and Charlotte took their overdose of barbiturates, in what should have been a peaceful exile in Brazil in 1942. Zweig ought to have had some inkling that the Nazis were not going to be allowed to overrun Europe as he feared. But the Second World War destroyed, for many artists, some fundamental belief in the humanity of the human race, and the possibility that truth and beauty might make a better world. Certainly those beliefs have been rarely in evidence ever since. The enormity of such a loss might well be behind the enigmatic words Zweig wrote in his final note, thanking the people of Brazil and saluting his friends:

‘May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, go on before.’

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Back in the day on March 20th, 1857, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was published. Stowe, a white woman, became motivated to write her most recognized work after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The novel, which was to become second only to sales of the Bible in the 19th century, attempted to illustrate the evils of the institution of slavery by contrasting the goodness of Uncle Tom, a slave, with the cruelty of his master Simon Legree. Defenders of slavery in South were angered by Stowe’s account and deemed it a work of slander. If Stowe’s detractors sought to persuade her to the supposed benevolence of the institution, they sure chose an odd way of displaying it when they sent a severed ear of a slave to the writer in a package.

However well meaning Stowe was in writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the anti-slavery novel nevertheless created and popularized stereotypes of African-Americans such as mammies and pickaninnies – all of which I’m sure the former mayor of Los Alamitos Dean Grose would claim to be unaware of!

Right, we’re going away for the weekend so I am allowing myself one hour absolutely no more in which to write about The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. It’s good to have some restraints when dealing with this novel, which is excessive, lengthy, and unrestrained in so many ways. On the one hand it’s about women throwing off those shackles of oppression and getting out of the kitchen and into the world, on the other, it can’t manage to be positive and forward-looking because it’s written from the point of view of women who’ve been wrongfully incarcerated, abused and belittled for most of their lives. Ostensibly it’s a novel, but I think it’s better described as other things, a series of Holocaust testimonies from the survivors of gendercide, perhaps, a version of Boccaccio’s Decameron in which all the travelers cooped up in a thwarted escape attempt turn out to be very angry women, a catalogue of sex crimes from the first half of the twentieth century. Well, it may be classified as feminist literature, but if I were back in the bookshop, I think I would be obliged to reshelve it alongside Stephen King in the horror section. It is a mostly gripping and disturbing read, one of those books that says a lot, disquietingly, about cultural history, and a flawed classic that ought to be discussed in schools, if it weren’t quite so long.

Ostensibly it is the story of Mira, who grows up in a distant, respectable family in the forties, marries and endures the suburban American dream of the fifties, goes through the destroying process of a divorce in the sixties and then returns to college, to Harvard in 1968, to witness a political scene in deep crisis that still has nothing of value to offer half the population. Mira’s personal story is constantly put to one side in order to explore the lives of her friends, women certainly no better off than herself, who escape abusive fathers to recreate the same situation with barely-known husbands, who pick their kids up from school in a drunken stupor, who are on the verge of a nervous breakdown from the demands of four or five children, who fall in love thinking it will be the answer and end up always disillusioned, embittered, and alone. The first half of the book screams out its message: the dream that is fed to women of satisfying domesticity, of romance and the rewards of childcare, is a dangerous and ultimately damaging fiction. The result is nothing more than emotional slavery with no recompense, and often with brutality or loveless sex thrown in for good measure. The blame for all this is laid fairly and squarely at the feet of men. The behaviour of the male characters moves on a spectrum from bland indifference to outright violence, but wherever the man may fall, an unacknowledged but underlying hatred of women is implied to be its cause. This novel marshals an army of women who are laying siege to the bastion of masculinity with some serious grievances, but it made me think of a siege in which the starving surround the walls of a prosperous city, where the citizens are well-fed and contented and didn’t want to go out anyway. For all the women may scream, the city’s inhabitants can’t hear them, because they happened to have the television turned up loud, or were reading something rather interesting in the paper. The emotional tone of the novel is relentlessly negative, but French’s descriptions of relationships do have a sort of anthropological truth to them.

The second half of the novel finds Mira tentatively feeling out liberation, having handed care of her children to her ex-husband and embarked on a graduate degree. If uneducated women from one generation can’t find satisfaction in their lives, is it possible for highly educated women who are mixing with the next generation, the novel asks? You can probably guess the answer. The novel was published in 1977 at the height of the second wave feminist movement when you might have thought it would be well-received, but it provoked and annoyed the majority of its feminist reviewers. In some ways I feel it rather missed the boat of consciousness-raising, which was most warmly welcomed in the sixties. Instead it landed in the middle of a political scene that needed to feel that change was on the way, that all kinds of freedoms had been won and that the future was bright.

I found a very interesting article on the internet (via Wikipedia) in which the author trawled through the masses of criticism leveled at this novel by feminist writers. There were two main points of attack; the first, which was maintained by men and women writers alike, was that the representation of men in this novel was unfairly skewed, that the novel lost credibility because it did not show a balance of men with some nice, caring, concerned husbands alongside the losers. The other criticism was that it had no prophetic vision at the end of a way that women could live in peace and harmony. The ending is very bleak, as if all the struggles Mira has gone though have been for nothing. I found this all extremely interesting, and to be absolutely honest, misguided. It shows me that if a book fell into the category of feminist literature, that meant there was a big prescription it had to fill out. It had to be irreproachable in its politics (if feminists were arguing they did not hate men, I agree it must have been galling to some extent to see a book roundly declaring the opposite), and it had to produce solutions, visions, blueprints. It had to be useful, it had to tick all the boxes. It lost its right to being literature, which is always an uncompromising wrestle with the recalcitrant parts of reality, the parts that don’t have easy solutions. I mean, I don’t see people ticking off Vladimir Nabokov for having written Lolita without producing a solution to the problem of child abuse. You might not like the book, but your grounds for doing so would be different. No, the problem with feminist literature was that it got backed into a corner, restrained on all sides; it had to be useful, it had to be perfect, it had to be beyond reproach. Do you see a pattern forming? Yup, that undermining feminine mentality, the one that says be perfect or else, is still ferociously at work here, emerging wholly unscathed from that particular wave of supposedly profound change. Women are still extremely harsh on one another, because at basis they are harsh on themselves.

If by the end of the novel, Mira has not managed to reframe isolation into independence, this is far from surprising. Given her background and her life experiences, it is wholly unlikely she would be able to. I think it remains a pressing question whether women have managed yet to free themselves from family and romance as their fundamental context, the place of their most captivating adventures. And here’s another uncomfortable thought for you: the book is perhaps most derided for the speech a character named Val makes, after having been through the wounding process of getting justice for her daughter, who has been the victim of a rape. The two women must face the collective hostility of the police and the lawyers, none of whom believe for a second that the girl did not in some way welcome or invite the sexual attack, and who express this view in the basest and most unpleasant terms imaginable in order to intimidate them into dropping the charges. The experience changes Val completely, and she withdraws into what she accepts is a fanatical position: ‘Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes.’ Now okay, suppose we agree that this is an extreme position (although not an unreasonable one for the fictional Val to take, given all her back history). But what chills me is that another book I’m reading, one published this year, is also a testimony account of a mother’s battle to get justice for her daughter, sexually abused for four years by an elderly uncle (77, if you’d like to know) and her failure to do so because of a judicial system that still disbelieves women and honours men. In this respect, nothing has changed. This is, I think, gallingly, worryingly terrible.

I cannot but agree that Marilyn French does not exactly make the reading experience pleasant. Her perspective is one-note and angry, embittered. But the tales of the different women she tells are probably mostly based on reality. Val’s story was always already true; her own daughter was raped, and she was very upfront about the autobiographical basis of that part of the story. And it has the feel of testimony – the telling of an experience that makes its listeners uncomfortable, precisely because it does not have the soothing, reassuring balances of art. The critics were harsh on it, for not doing the things a novel ought to do, for not saying the things that would have been politically useful, but there’s also the small matter of three and a half million copies sold to women who must have hungrily devoured the pages of domestic horror, finally finding the expression of a certain truth. The Women’s Room does not say what we always want to hear, but there are very good reasons, still, for reading it.

“Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being.”

“How strong you are! How many years do you mean to live after I am gone?” Heathcliff had knelt on one knee to embrace her; he attempted to rise, but she seized his hair, and kept him down. “I wish I could hold you,” she continued, bitterly, “till we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do!”

—Emily Bronte as Catherine Earnshaw Linton, Wuthering Heights

The story of the remorseless Catherine and uncontrollable Heathcliff bears all the marks of a particularly rancid Harlequin romance. An impetuous, beautiful, selfish girl falls in love with a brooding, vicious boy who finally admits he loves her back. There is no sweet, shy heroine to save them. They destroy their own lives and the lives of those around them with their violent shenanigans. That’s all.

No wonder contemporary readers rolled their eyes in horror.

And yet Emily Bronte was one of the greatest of the greats. With a single novel, she made literary history.

Bronte managed a feat the rest of us can only dream of—she told the appalling story of an unsympathetic couple in such a classical manner that readers elevate her characters to the status of archetypes and her conflict to the realm of Greek tragedy.

How did she do it?

Without internal dialog.

The story of Wuthering Heights is told through an extremely unusual structure: a frame-within-a-frame-within-a-frame. That is, the narrator—so unimportant that his own name and life mean nothing to the reader at all—relates the story as told to him by a servant, who grew up with Catherine and Heathcliff and personally supervised them through their tumultuous drama. By all accounts, this structure should remove the reader so thoroughly from the action that it becomes barely more than a summary. Even the double first-person voice can’t overcome the fact that the reader never actually gets inside the head of either Catherine or Heathcliff, never feels their feelings, never thinks their thoughts, never follows the logic of their internal conclusions to the rationale that would make their highly-idiosyncratic behavior even the slightest bit justified.

Nobody should be able to identify with these people.

And yet we do. In spite of the amazing unlikelihood than any of the thousands of readers who’ve loved Wuthering Heights in the 162 years since it was first published ever destroyed either themselves or their families through the reckless narcissism of their combined self-love and self-loathing in such a spectacular and memorable way—we identify. Something in Catherine and Heathcliff lives in us.

What the double distance of Bronte’s complex structure does is allow her to show her characters in the most flamboyant terms she could imagine. Catherine slaps, torments, and raves. Heathcliff locks others up, beats, beatss, steals, and kidnaps. They’re monsters! But they’re removed so effectively from the reader that they become theater, in exactly the same way that Greek tragedians were able to tear out their own eyes, marry their own parents, even—horribly—feed each other their own children and still bring their audience back for more.

“[He's] not. . .a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself.” The insight into human love is striking and impossibly true. That is how we love a single partner throughout life. We do confuse them over the years in our own minds with ourselves, with our own hopes and fears, our own desires and phobias, our own wants, our own selfish concerns, our own identities. Bronte doesn’t gives us Catherine’s thoughts about this. Catherine says it.

“She seized his hair.” It’s unexpected. Heathcliff finally admits he loves her—he’s on his knees embracing her! So she grabs his hair and yanks him back down. This is how we feel at the height of emotion after decades of loving and hating one person. We do want to both keep them and reject them, to pull them to us and punish them for abandoning us, to cling to them no matter what it does to them, just to control them, to finally control them. Bronte doesn’t tell us this is how Catherine feels. She shows it.

In all its complexity, ambiguity, ugliness, and passion—this is what it’s like to love.

Internal dialog weakens fiction. It tells readers what to think and feel. Who wants to be bossed around by someone they don’t even know? Readers want to be put into the characters and allowed to experience what the characters think and feel for themselves.

There may be situations in which internal dialog is necessary. Sometimes the detective may have to mislead the reader through a maze of conflicting clues.  Sometimes the lover may have to feel something unexpected in order to take the reader to the threshold of a new plot twist. Sometimes the scientist may have to lose their train of thought in order for their “Eureka!” to be truly thrilling.

But these moments are rare.

The truth is that your characters’ behavior and speech carry nearly all— if not every speck—of information your readers need. What the characters don’t convey, the writer’s physical senses do. There are sights, sounds, smells, physical feelings, and even tastes in your characters’ world.

Your readers don’t want to be told what it’s like to live your characters’ lives. They want to live them.

Emily Bronte never loved a man other than her brother and father. She didn’t flout authority, taunt her siblings, insult, pull hair, kick, or laugh at others’ misery. She didn’t gamble, trespass, maliciously betray love, force anyone to marry, or hang anybody’s lap dog. She didn’t know anyone who did. She lived a quiet life in the cold stone house she grew up in, baking, cleaning, writing secret poetry about an imaginary country, trying to avoid having to teach school, and periodically firing her father’s gun for him when he became too blind to shoot holes in the church tower outside his bedroom window for himself.

She didn’t want to tell herself how it would feel to love and hate the man of her dreams, the archetype who visited her late at night in her tiny room as she bent with a candle over her portable desk. She didn’t want to think about what things she might think if that man were real.

She wanted to do it.

And through the behavior and speech of the bizarre characters she pictured, she did.

She gave that to all of us.

The Dublin Writers Museum is a must visit for visiting aspiring writers

I just got back yesterday from a 24 hour trip to Dublin (taking advantage of some cheap flight deals), and for the most part, it was a rather uneventful trip.  Full details of the trip can be found in my Travel Diary.

However, as an aspiring writer, it was also unexpectedly motivational.  As pathetic as it is to admit, I had no idea Dublin had such a rich literary history.  The first bit of inspiration came when I walked past Dublin’s City Hall, which, as fate would have it, was holding the Dublin Book Festival (last day too).  Despite the actual festival not having much to exite me (a couple of stands and some people handing out awards and diplomas of sorts), I took it as a sign (more on this later).

The second and true source of inspiration was a little visit to the Dublin Writer Museum (at 18 Parnell Square, Dublin 1).  It has a very unassuming exterior, and the interior resembles a quiet residence or a suburban office, with a small front office, 2 rooms of exhibitions downstairs, a library and a Gallery of Writers upstairs, plus a gift shop tucked away on the first floor corner.  But there are so many treasures inside!  I knew very little about Ireland’s literary history, and was completely unaware that some of the greatest writers in the history of the world were from Dublin, and most of them attended Trinity College (of Dublin University).  James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Samuel Beckett, Oliver Goldsmith, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats – just some of the famous names you’d expect to come across.  Each visitor is given an audio guide that adds colour to your journey through Dublin’s literary history, detailing the lives, struggles and masterpieces of these magnificent writers.  Just seeing the cover of the first edition of Ulysses or Dracula made me tremor with inspiration.  Just reading a few lines of Yeats’ poems made me want to whip out my note pad and start writing right then and there.  Their freakish abilties to use even the simplest words to convey the deepest of emotions left me in awe.  It was a magical experience.

I ended up spending about 2 hours in the Dublin Writers Museum, but I could have just as easily spent 5 or 6 if I wanted to.  There’s also a James Joyce Museum nearby, but unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to check it out.  Maybe next time.

You see, recently I started seriously contemplating a career change from boring lawyer to exciting writer.  It will be a massive step, one that would have ultra life-changing consequences, but it’s no longer feeling like a pipe dream.  I’m actually starting to lean over the precipice that I could not have imagined even coming close to a year ago.  I still don’t have a clue where to start, and whether I actually do it or not in the next twelve months is still up in the air.  But for the first time in a long time, I’m feeling hope.

I’ve got a little backlog of reviews to do here. But you know how it is when a book you’ve just finished jumps the queue and demands to be dealt with? Such is the case with Janet Malcolm’s highly intriguing biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Two Lives. Malcolm specializes in unusual biographies, of the type that consider not just the lives in view, but the whole process of investigation and research that transforms them into coherent stories. She does this quite brilliantly in her account of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, The Hidden Woman. And in Two Lives she’s following a similar format by exploring another literary marriage. With Plath and Hughes, Malcolm had her work cut out trying to distinguish myth from reality in the stories that rose up around one of the most famous couples in literature. In Two Lives, she has a very different focus, returning initially to the 1920s when Gertrude and Alice spot the house of their dreams, deep in the French countryside. Unfortunately, someone’s already living in it, but with a bit of finagling, friends in the right places and a certain amount of pressure (the ratios of these ingredients are unclear as the account of how the house was won varies, naturally, depending on who’s telling it), Gertrude and Alice win the day and install themselves comfortably in their gorgeous rural retreat. It was a good example of what Malcolm calls ‘life’s evident inability to say no to Gertrude Stein’, who managed to be a delightful spoiled child, looked after, cared for, rescued and aided by all those who loved her. And in 1932 at the age of fifty-eight, determined that all the literary world should finally love her too, Stein put to one side her somewhat grinding experimental style and wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It’s rare in these matters that intention matches outcome, but the book did indeed become a bestseller and remains arguably her best-known work.

So, when World War Two came along in 1939, with life having so far been really rather kind to Gertrude Stein, one might think that she would not push her luck. Instead, despite all manner of strong suggestions that they return to America or seek safe exile in Switzerland, Gertrude and Alice dug their heels in and decided to stay put. This was an extraordinary decision, flying in the face of rationality, and what’s more, it paid off. Stein and Toklas remained safe and untroubled throughout the war years and lived in relative comfort. Malcolm is astonished and somewhat suspicious: ‘How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?’ she asks, and it’s a very good question indeed.

It’s a question that Malcolm always keeps in view, but which she responds to in dilatory, roundabout ways. The biography is split into three sections, the first and the last focusing on Stein and Toklas’s relationship with particular interest in those war years, the middle section focused instead on Stein’s 900-page tome, The Making of Americans, written between 1903 and 1911. Forget the easy read of the colloquial, chanting Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, this is the style that Elizabeth Hardwick would describe as ‘wringing the neck of her words’, toiling through the permutations of her severely reduced vocabulary in an attempt to squeeze every last drop of meaning out of it. As such, it is a book that has not made it onto the mainstream academic list of Stein’s works and remains a challenge of reading machismo. Malcolm states modestly that she has ‘only read it twice’, which is of course something I, myself, wouldn’t be able to resist mentioning, had I had to get through it.  What would propel the book into the public spotlight would be the notebooks that Stein kept whilst writing the chunkster, and which reveal a very different side to the author. In them, Stein abandons her jolly, happy-go-lucky persona and reveals instead a rather ugly, vicious side. The notebooks, however, have been transcribed, studied and explored by only one academic, a man named Leon Katz, who also won the confidence of Alice Toklas after Stein’s death and can therefore be considered to be sitting on a virtual goldmine of biographical information. Alas, Katz is a slow writer, as the decades have passed, no publication has appeared, and he refuses to allow other academics to steal his thunder. Malcolm attempts to meet him, but he evades her. There is another side to Stein, that much is clear, but its details are not out in the public realm.

This is the kind of chase around the facts that Janet Malcolm excels at, drawing in scholars, bystanders, independent witnesses, other biographers, to the crucible of her narrative. She performs something similar with the character of Bernard Faÿ, the French right-wing academic who acted as protector to Stein and Toklas during the war. It transpires that Monsieur Faÿ was not a terribly nice person, but the question is really the extent to which Gertrude and Alice were aware of this, and the extent to which they were truthful or not about their own race and religion. Malcolm is very good indeed at pointing out that the incidental characters of biography, even more than the secondary characters of fiction, often hide a perspective on the main protagonists that it is worth the detective work to reveal. But inevitably, the storyline that the biographer has chosen for her subject tends to dominate: the biography, Malcolm writes ‘must cultivate a kind of narcissism on behalf of his subject that blinds him to the full humanity of anyone else. As he turns the bracing storylessness of human life into the flaccid narrativity of biography, he cannot worry about the people who never asked to be dragged into his shaky enterprise.’ On the whole, however, this is exactly what Janet Malcolm does do. Her secondary characters are allowed a full three-dimensional life within her stories, and this is sometimes fascinating and sometimes not. This biography features a coven of three, elderly Stein scholars whom she regularly consults, but whom she clearly likes too much to make into the ambivalent characters that brought her book on Plath to life. And so they fall a little flat. Realising that people have hidden agendas when they talk about people they’ve met – particularly people who end up being famous – is part of the unique thrill of her writing. But what this means as a consequence for the story she is telling, is much digression and divergence. We peer into her subjects lives, poke around in the corners of their wardrobes and filing cabinets, meet their friends and enemies, gather a pile of interesting evidence, and then leave it at that. Being as truthful as the tidying-up exercise of biography will allow means not coming to any conclusions.

I found this at first to be a frustration. After all, Malcolm asks a very good question about Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, foreigners in a foreign war-torn land, where terrified people were shopping their Jewish friends and neighbours, people they’d known all their lives, women, children, the elderly, to the internal police. It’s not a negligible matter that they survived so comfortably. The reasons they did so seem to boil down to good connections (which may mean hanging out with war criminals) and a steadfast rejection of their Jewishness. But Malcolm has a compelling justification for not finally plumping on this conclusion. ‘Perhaps Stein had a secret Jewish life,’ she proposes. ‘Biography and autobiography are the aggregate of what, in the former, the author happens to learn, and, in the latter, he chooses to tell. A cache of letters between Stein and a rabbi may be discovered that will cast a whole new light on Stein’s Jewish identity. Such discoveries are a regular inconvenience of the biographical enterprise.’ And in the end she convinced me; I think we’re too used to the media permitting and consolidating wafer-thin snap judgements on people in the public eye, not to mention its politically correct corollary that insists on a blind-eyed embrace of humanity, regardless of the truth of faults, flaws and defects. The reality of life is always somewhere messily in between, where people remain contradictory and incoherent, neither good nor bad, but creative, deceitful, loving and evasive. The journey Janet Malcolm takes through the by-roads of her subject’s archives and witnesses is in any case far more entertaining than any conclusion might be.

It’s generally accepted that horrors iconic monsters have a long and colorful literary history.

The ghost and vampire, for example, both trace their heritage back to distinguished works of fiction from the nineteenth century and earlier. However, the zombie really did not become a part of American popular culture until 1929.

Get the low-down here:
http://booksandauthorsblog.com/archives/164

The Sister, by Paola Kaufmann, is a swift-paced and deceptively easy to read novel that ends up lingering a long time in the mind. It is a delicate reconstruction of the life of Emily Dickinson, and of her afterlife as a controversial, famous poet, told through the eyes of her younger sister, Lavinia. Vinnie’s first person account begins with the discovery of Dickinson’s poems, almost two thousand of them, after her death, but slips quickly back into childhood, to follow a chronological account from that point on. She describes the Dickinsons as a close-knit family, admiring of their stern father and their older brother, Austin; and even if their mother is somewhat distant and cool they move through life in steady union, bonded by love, duty and a strict adherence to routine. The first half of the book depicts a quiet and mostly peaceful early life, broken into only by romances that never came to anything much. Emily Dickinson’s loves by correspondence are beautifully handled in the novel, tied up together neatly in the one chapter so that the emerging pattern of her admiration – intense, distant, literary – can clearly be seen. Equally well done is their comparison to Lavinia’s own romantic disappointments. Lavinia fell in love with Joseph Lyman, was courted by him and promised to him, only when Joseph left on a get-rich trip to the South, he never came back. Eventually, he married someone else instead. Lavinia’s grinding twelve year wait for him starts to open up unexpected light on our narrator. From that point on we begin to understand that spinsterhood is the condition she desires for Emily, as well as for herself, and that the years of quiet isolation together have formed a bond that is unhealthy as well as profoundly loving. Lavinia, the pretty, dramatic, outgoing sister, was owed a life of greater import, of a more startling and eventful narrative, and so as time goes on we watch her shrinking hopes start to transform into a need to live vicariously.

In the second part of the novel drama comes, but in a series of terrible events that the Dickinsons would never have wished for. The clean-cut family allegiances turn complex, resentful, and problematic, and Emily’s strange but fierce desire for isolation starts to provoke repercussions. As the narrative picks up pace and power, so we become aware of Lavinia’s unreliability as a narrator, and this is never more evident that in the final sections where her motivation for publishing her sister’s works is put literally on trial.

I enjoyed this novel very much indeed. The narrative is written with what I can only describe as a very light hand – there is such delicacy in the early stages of the representation; a cobwebby string of language brings the Dickinsons together in a life that looks so patterned and regular but which turns out to be utterly fragile and insecure. As the novel progresses and Lavinia heads towards her own nemesis, so Kaufmann lets go of the restraint and a very different kind of narrator bursts through at the end. But what I felt was so clever about this book is the way that Emily Dickinson is its prime concern and its best kept secret. By the time the story ends, we have lived alongside her, witnessed her daily life, shared her tragedies and wondered at her fate. And yet, as Lavinia herself declares, it feels like we don’t really know her, she remains a shadowy figure whose brilliant poetry sprung bounteous and startling from her death. How could someone as close as a loving sister, even, feel she still knew the woman who turned out to have produced a verse that was different to any before seen in America? And how could that same sister, sadly disappointed in her own uneventful life, not wish to appropriate the glory of Emily for herself by any means available? The clever title points to the ambiguity as to which sister is the focus of the narrative here, and in this way, Emily remains potent but veiled. The enigma of Emily Dickinson is both the frustration of the narrative and its sharpest, most authentic insight.

It’s quite shocking to think that I first read this book back in 1990 when I was a mere 21 years old. It was always going to be interesting to return to it, as the passage of time can alter impressions so much. When I first read it, Jeanette Winterson formed one corner of a triumvirate of favourite authors, the other two being occupied by Anita Brookner and Julian Barnes. Barnes has stayed with me over the long journey of my critical apprenticeship, but the two women have both fallen away and it’s many years since I read a novel by either of them.

In 1990, I was dazzled by Winterson’s inventiveness. Sexing the Cherry is a slim novel, a mere 140-pages, but they are so full of event and imagination that it would be hard to digest more. It’s a tale of many strands and layers but at its heart it returns to London in the 1660s where the Dog Woman, a monstrous giantess, finds a young orphan boy, Jordan on the banks of the Thames and adopts him for her own. Together they embark on a life of adventure, the Dog Woman proving herself an adept ally for the soon-to-be deposed King, her natural talents for violence and loyalty put to use in slaying many a dissenting voice and in doing her best to alter the course of history. Jordan, by contrast, is a dreamer, and his destiny lies in magical voyages to impossible lands where he searches for love and the truth about time and space. In the later stages of the novel these characters find ghostly doubles in the future, in the form of Nicholas Jordan who devotes his life to the Navy and an unnamed woman whose vigilante actions to protect the environment (a theme that Winterson will return to in The Stone Gods) make her at once both heroine and madwoman. It’s typical of the topsy-turvy logic of the novel that these characters in the future are pale imitations of the Dog Woman and Jordan in the past. Winterson delights in turning everything on its head, not least the normal plot progression of a narrative. Sexing the Cherry is full of interpolates stories, mostly based on the principle of the fairy tale, but with morals and messages that are subversive. The Twelve Dancing Princesses, for instance, indulge in every kind of gender-bending activity you could dream up, and then some. There’s so much packed into its pages that this book can make your head swim, with its bawdy, rambunctious rewriting of history and its fragmentary, choppy progression through a wild range of stories and narrators, not to mention its fascination with the fantastic nature of time and space as seen through the veil of quantum physics. I think it’s a book that wants to set off sparks, rather than one that can be understood by coherent principles, and with that thought in mind, I’ll mention just a couple of points that occur to me.

The character of the Dog Woman owes a great deal to the giant, Gargantua, who was created by the French author, Francois Rabelais in the seventeenth century. Gargantua was also caught up in political battles and used his huge strength to literally destroy the opposition, but at the same time he is a comedy character, a vehicle for cartoon violence and toilet humour. Rabelais knew what he was doing when he employed a giant in his narrative. On the one hand he was a crowd pleaser for his audience of readers, and on the other, he could carry subversive messages about the state of government in France that would have been extremely dangerous for him to express clearly. If he had said what he thought, the Catholic church would have chopped his head off, and so it was a good plan, not to mention a real laugh, to have a ludicrous figure like a giant embody his message. Rabelais’s Gargantua is an example of what’s known as the ‘carnivalesque’, a style of literature in which chaos and humour present an opportunity to challenge dominant beliefs and turn all hierarchies on their heads. The carnival is the place of madcap entertainment that brings everyone together to celebrate common humanity. Hence the toilet humour, as people in Rabelais’ time thought that the lower half of the body was special and sacred, as it was the place of all fertility, the origin of the world. Bawdy jokes weren’t just rude, they reminded people that kings and peasants have excretion in common, and that the circle of life is a wonder and a marvel. We’ve rather lost that sort of belief nowadays, but Winterson’s use of a female giant is a good way to poke fun at a few shreds of taboos that cling to the female body.

Alongside the carnivalesque, Winterson’s novel appeals also to the modern genre of magic realism. This kind of narrative grew mostly out of Latin America in the work of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabelle Allende. It concerns stories where fantastic and extraordinary events occur all the time, without anyone blinking an eyelid. Instead, magic suggests itself as a natural phenomenon, arising out of the real world as if it had been hidden inside it all along. Like the carnivalesque it’s always been seen as a way to challenge authority, or to rewrite history, including voices that would otherwise have been silenced. In the dictatorial regimes of Latin America, it was easy to see where the subversion was headed, but when magic realism crossed over into Europe, that sense of straining against the unreasonable restraints of an unjust political system was missing. Other sorts of confinements became the target. I was thinking about this as I was reading along and wondering what Winterson’s text rubbed up against, what constraints it was trying to loosen. And because of my recent interests, I found myself most caught up, in this reading, in the relationship between the Dog Woman and Jordan, the most realistic, natural and touching part of the narrative.

Their story is one of real love and tenderness, and also one of the inevitable misrecognition that lies between mother and child. ‘I want to be like my rip-roaring mother,’ Jordan declares, ‘who cares nothing for how she looks, only for what she does. She has never been in love, no, and never wanted to be either. She is self-sufficient and without self-doubt…. I think she loves me but I don’t know. She wouldn’t say so, perhaps she doesn’t know herself.’ Yet we, who are privy to the Dog Woman’s inner thoughts, know how she cares for him, and witness the wrench she feels when Jordan leaves for his thirteen-year long sea voyage. When finally he returns, washed up on the shores of the Thames for a second time, she is there, faithful as ever, to meet him. ‘I wanted to tell him things, to tell him I loved him and how much I’d missed him, but thirteen years of words were fighting in my throat and I couldn’t get any of them out. There was too much to say and so I said nothing.’ And in this way they remain loving, and tender, and unknown to one another.

The sense that we are more than the bodies in which we dwell, more than the span of time and space we occupy, more than anyone on the outside, looking in, could guess, is a recurrent theme in the book. The loving side of the Dog Woman is one example of the important parts of the self that remain hidden, the other is the imagination, where anything and everything is possible. Jordan’s voyage may ostensibly be to strange and wonderful lands, but he knows the real discovery he wants to make is to find himself. ‘Are we all living like this?’ Jordan wonders. ‘Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets? And poignantly he concludes ‘and if the other life, the secret life, could be found and brought home, then a person might live in peace and have no need for God.’ The magic in this novel concerns the extraordinary capacity of the imagination to create new worlds, and the elastic sense of space and time that governs our experience of existing. Inside us, I felt Winterson was saying, we have an infinite capacity, and our external appearance betrays us with its one dimensionality, its boring obviousness. Sexing the Cherry takes us on its own journey to the outer limits of possibility, to remind us that the marvelous is only ever a brief flexing of the imagination away, and that we all have secret lives we need to explore and experience fully to be at peace.

Cross-posted at Slaves of Golconda

December 14, 2004