July 23
James Woods on Fiction
Rohan Maitzen posted on James Woods, How Fiction Works, at Novel Readings on 12 March, and at The Valve on 27 March. Now Salon, Slate, and The New Republic (Frank Kermode) have decided to follow.
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July 22
Summer Reading Project: Adam Bede (Chapters 27-35)
First, in the serendipity category, today’s “Review-a-Day” from Powell’s is the Atlantic Monthly on George Eliot’s first published fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life:
Fiction represents the character of the age to which it belongs, not merely by actual delineations of its times, like those of Tom Jones and The Newcomes, but also in an indirect, though scarcely less positive manner, by its exhibition of the influence of the times upon its own form and general direction, whatever the scene or period it may have chosen for itself. The story of “Hypatia” is laid in Alexandria almost two thousand years ago, but the book reflects the crudities of modern English thought; and even Mr. Thackeray, the greatest living master of costume, succeeds in making his Esmond only a joint-production of the Addisonian age and our own. Thus the novels of the last few years exhibit very clearly the spirit that characterizes the period of regard for men and women as men and women, without reference to rank, beauty, fortune, or privilege. Novelists recognize that Nature is a better romance-maker than the fancy, and the public is learning that men and women are better than heroes and heroines, not only to live with, but also to read of. Now and then, therefore, we get a novel, like these Scenes of Clerical Life, in which the fictitious element is securely based upon a broad groundwork of actual truth, truth as well in detail as in general.
It is not often, however, even yet, that we find a writer wholly unembarrassed by and in revolt against the old theory of the necessity of perfection in some one at least of the characters of his story. “Neither Luther nor John Bunyan,” says the author of this book, “would have satisfied the modern demand for an ideal hero, who believes nothing but what is true, feels nothing but what is excellent, and does nothing but what is graceful.”
The Atlantic Monthly’s review of Adam Bede was actually featured not that long ago:
We do not know where to look, in the whole range of contemporary fictitious literature, for pictures in which the sober and the brilliant tones of Nature blend with more exquisite harmony than in those which are set in every chapter of Adam Bede. Still life—the harvest-field, the polished kitchens, the dairies with a concentrated cool smell of all that is nourishing and sweet, the green, the porches that have vines about them and are pleasant late in the afternoon, and deep woods thrilling with birds—all these were never more vividly, and yet tenderly depicted. The characters are drawn with a free and impartial hand, and one of them is a creation for immortality. Mrs. Poyser is a woman with an incorrigible tongue, set firmly in opposition to the mandates of a heart the overflows of whose sympathy and love keep the circle of her influence in a state of continual irrigation. Her epigrams are aromatic, and she is strong in simile, but never ventures beyond her own depth into that of her author.
That brings us to today’s installment, which includes the immortal Mrs. Poyser having “her say out”:
“Yis, I know I’ve done it,” said Mrs Poyser, “but I’ve had my say out, and I shall be th’ easier for ‘t all my life. There’s no pleasure i’ living, if you’re to be corked up for iver, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel."
To which any one of us who has ever been accused of speaking out of turn (or just speaking too much) can say a hearty “hear, hear!”
Now, too, we’ve reached, not the crisis of the book, but a crisis at least, as Arthur’s guilty secret comes out and he and Adam face off “with the instinctive fierceness of panthers.”
One of the most compelling aspects of this volume for me is Arthur’s growing realization of one of GE’s most stringent moral laws--you cannot escape your deeds:
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a man’s critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character. There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this reason--that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right. . . . Europe adjusts itself to a fait accompli, and so does an individual character,--until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution.
She returns to the fatality of action in Romola--
Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.
and again in Middlemarch--
1st Gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
2nd Gent. Ay, truly, but I think it is the world
That brings the iron.
How often, in George Eliot’s fiction, do past deeds return to haunt, confound, or indict those who seek to leave their pasts behind? Your own actions are her version of Nemesis, as many critics have pointed out; when disaster comes, most of the time you have only yourself to blame--or, yourself and the particular “combination of outward with inward facts” that has created the context in which your actions became inevitable. Often, though, she embodies that doom: Baldassare confronts Tito, Raffles returns to Bulstrode--here Hetty and her unborn child represent Arthur’s moral degradation--his deed iss literally a child, but the child, perhaps, is more easily avoided than the deed itself. One explanation that is sometimes given for the length and detail of George Eliot’s novels (in which, as has been pointed out here, there is often a long, largely discursive prelude to any distinct event) is that these outward and inward circumstances need to be established fully enough that we can appreciate the causes of the action, as well as anticipate the consequences. This is all driven by her idea of determinism, summed up by George Levine as an “idea-simple at bottom but leading to enormous complications-that every event has its causal antecedents.” Here’s a bit more of Levine’s explanation of this theory:
George Eliot saw a deterministic universe as a marvelously complex unit in which all parts are intricately related to each other, where nothing is really isolable, and where past and future are both implicit in the present. Nothing in such a universe is explicable without reference to the time and place in which it occurs or exists. This suggested that one can never make a clearcut break with the society in which one has been brought up, with one’s friends and relations, with one’s past. Any such break diminishes a man’s wholeness and is the result of his failure to recognize his ultimate dependence on others, their claims on him, and the consequent need for human solidarity. For George Eliot, every man’s life is at the center of a vast and complex web of causes,” a good many of which exert pressure on him from the outside and come into direct conflict with his own desires and motives.
Of course, as Levine discusses in detail, this view went hand-in-hand for her with a stringent commitment to individual responsibility. Interestingly, Levine uses Adam Bede to illustrate this point:
*The point is that although every action is caused, few causes are uncontrollable in the sense that no effort to alter them can succeed. As long as the cause is not a compulsion, that is, as long as it is not physically impossible or excessively dangerous to will differently and as long as one is not so mentally ill that one cannot will differently even if one wants to, one is responsible for his actions. To take an example: in Adam Bede, Arthur Donnithorne was free to avoid the circumstances which drew him into sexual relations with Hetty Sorrel. He was aware that he should have told Mr. Irwine about his feelings, but he chose not to. And even though he was helped in avoiding confession by Irwine’s overly decorous refusal to make him talk, Arthur was under no compulsion to be silent. At one point in the conversation between Arthur and Irwine, Irwine figuratively and implicitly makes the distinction between cause and compulsion. Arthur says to him:
“Well, but one may be betrayed into doing things by a combination of circumstances, which one might never have done otherwise.” “Why, yes [Irwine replies], a man can’t very well steal a bank-note unless the bank-note lies within convenient reach; but he won’t make us think him an honest man because he begins to howl at the banknote for falling in his way.” (Ch. XVI)
The bank-note’s presence, that is to say, is one of the causes of the theft, but there is nothing in its presence serving as a compulsion to make a man steal it.
This is one line of interpretation we might wish to pursue, but as always, questions and comments on any topic are welcome.
In case anyone needs reminders or is joining in a bit belatedly, the overall schedule is here. Previous discussions have covered Chapters 1-5, Chapters 6-11, Chapters 12-16, Chapters 17-21, and Chapters 22-26.
*These quotations are from Levine’s essay “Determinism and Responsibility in the Works of George Eliot,” PMLA 77:3 (June 1962).
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Straw Man and Other Superheroes
This is a guest post by Martyn Pedler, his contribution to our Doug Wolk “Reading Comics” Event. I found the following bio of Martyn lying around somewhere on the web, so presumably it must be true. (It’s on the web, right? So it must be true?) “Martyn Pedler is a Fitzroy writer of all kinds of pop- and pulp-fiction. He completed his Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne with a novella about how disappointed we all were when the world failed to end on New Year’s Eve 1999. His fairly terrifying comic book collection is stored safely in long, white boxes under his bed, and no, you can’t touch them.” - the former editor
Right now, respectable graphic novels are winning enough awards that it’s no longer shocking, and superheroes loom larger than ever in the popular imagination. Douglas Wolk’s book Reading Comics straddles both extremes of comic-bound stories. One of the pleasures of the book is his wide analytical sweep – from Tomb of Dracula to David B. to Grant Morrison to Cerebus the Aardvark. It’s wide enough that Wolk interrogates himself about exactly what he will and won’t include, creating a handily-labelled ‘Straw Man’ who asks questions like: "Have you noticed that that’s mostly a description of what you’re not writing about?"
I don’t doubt the need to clarify this point, as defining what the hell ‘comics’ actually are is a herculean task. I do find it interesting that the first section of Reading Comics shares so much in common with Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and that the authors of both books build themselves straw men with which to argue. (McCloud casts himself as a stand-up comedian, while hecklers call him on his taxonomical errors.) Part of Wolk’s argument is that it’s time to lose the "Team Comics" mentality – the rah-rah, comics-are-art-I-swear-! defensiveness that’s come from too many years of seeing comic books languish at the bottom of the cultural heap; perhaps this need to imagine rhetorical opponents tells a different story.
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July 21
My Comment Policy
As some of you may know, I have recently decided to close comments on two threads that I started, Who Was Shakespeare? and The Raw Critic: “The Dark Knight." These actions reflect my personal decision and should not be taken as indicative of any change in policy at The Valve. Valve policy, as far as I can determine, is rather loose.
Why did I do this? I suppose I just got fed up. In the case of the Shakespeare thread, the issue is one that invites circular discussions and I couldn’t see any particular reason to keep spinning this one out. The Batman discussion seemed rather circular as well. Beyond that, as I explained in my concluding comment, I had a particular reason for creating that thread and the discussion pretty much destroyed it for me: I actually wanted to discuss the film.
Will I do this with other threads that I initiate? I don’t know, but I suppose I will. Will I give any sort of warning? I don’t know; I didn’t in these two cases. But now that I’ve decided that closing down discussion is something I’m willing to do, I suppose I’ll consider giving warning in the future. What are my criteria for doing this? The best I can do is offer those two threads as examples. I’m making this up as I go along. I don’t mind thread drift and I don’t mind argument and debate. I do mind whatever it is that was going on in those two threads.
Whatever that is, it is common in blog discussions, and common enough at The Valve. I don’t see any reason why I should encourage it. If that means that I’ve got to act in an arbitrary way to shut down a thread, well, I’ll do that. I see no reason why John Emerson should get all the curmudgeon points around here. Note that this applies only to threads that I initiate. I do not have the capability to turn comments off for threads initiated by others and wouldn’t do so if I did. They’re responsible for conversations they initiate.
What do I like? Cooperative discussion. Cooperative discussion doesn’t preclude either thread drift or disagreement and argument. But it does require a sense of limits. At the moment Rohan Maitzen’s discussion of Adam Bede seems to be working in this way. More of that would be a good thing.
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The Churchill Case Goes to Trial: What Should AAUP Do?
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Sometime in early 2009, the Denver District Court will begin to hear testimony in Ward Churchill’s lawsuit against the University of Colorado.
It will be a very different national political climate than the one in which Churchill’s reference to Hannah Arendt’s classic study of the banality of evil*, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) set in motion events that led to his termination on charges of “plagiarism” and “research misconduct.”
The processes of shared governance at the University of Colorado’s flagship campus will themselves be on trial. The result may raise questions about the integrity of those processes not just at UC, but at many other campuses with similar (or lesser) degrees of faculty participation in decision-making.
My own views** are consistent with those of the national American Civil Liberties Union, and Eric Cheyfitz, Cornell’s Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters.
Cheyfitz, who examined the investigating committee’s report and testified about it before a UC panel, concluded that the charges were “fabricated” and “fundamentally baseless,” and flow from “problems in the investigating committee’s own flawed scholarship.”
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July 20
AAUP and the Ward Churchill case
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Over at Brainstorm, a furor erupted based on one reader’s remark, “The AAUP’s defense of Churchill also prevents me from renewing my membership. What a waste of resources!”
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The Raw Critic: “The Dark Knight”
I saw the two Tim Burton Batman flicks, and then the third, Batman Forever, but that’s it. In particular, I didn’t see Batman Begins which, so I’ve heard, restarted the franchise. As the summer began I was vaguely aware that another installment was on the way, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was more attuned to WALL-E, which, BTW has dropped in my estimation since I wrote about it. I read another review, did some more thinking, and it just fell apart. But I digress.
Last week it seemed that wherever I went online I’d see pictures of Heath Ledger in Joker make-up. Strange. And then the first reviews hit: The Dark Knight is the greatest thing since sliced bread! And then there’s the theme struck in the opening line of Christopher Orr’s review: “How far can an idle entertainment be bent toward art without breaking?” This film is suspended somewhere between art and entertainment, and that’s good.
I guess.
If you want a recommendation: Sure, go see it. I’m likely to see it again; I may even venture into Manhattan to see the Imax version.
Comments have been closed, but I have preserved them below the fold. Why have comments been closed? Because they had little to do with the film.
Talent and the Passionate Tradition
This is a guest post by Peter Paik, assoc. prof. of comp lit. at the University of Wisconsin. John Holbo is friends with Peter, ever since Peter invited John to be on a Zizek panel, once upon a time. And that was fun. And they both like comics, so why not invite him to contribute to our Doug Wolk event, eh? So here he is. - the former editor
Once upon a time there were troubling reports that the sages of the realm were abdicating their solemn duties, which were to study and teach the sacred texts that comprised “the best which has been thought and said in the world.” Instead of dedicating themselves to composing erudite commentaries upon the timeless and exalted works of the literary canon, the priests and priestesses of culture were reputed to be indulging an appetite for rubbish and waste, immersing themselves in the dregs of sensationalistic stories aimed at titillating semi-literate audiences of sex and violence-obsessed teenagers and sociopathic brutes, like gangbangers and wiseguys. The sterner tribunes of the people were appalled to learn, moreover, that the holy scriptures were being denigrated by their erstwhile guardians as stuffy and elitist, and denounced for reinforcing oppressive and discriminatory hierarchies. They sounded the alarm bells that some apocalyptic cataclysm, such as the disintegration of the barriers separating the infinite dimensions of the multiverse or the arrival of a certain purple-helmeted, planet-consuming menace, was surely around the corner as a fitting retribution for the failure of the custodians of culture and tradition to maintain the bright green light of the eternal wisdom shining from the great books.
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July 19
Long Sunday
It’s been over two months since its last new post: is LS still alive? A shame, if not.
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July 18
Who Was Shakespeare?
Back when I was in grad school at SUNY Buffalo I was roaming the library stacks one day and came across a whole section devoted to books seeking the true Shakespeare; most of them dated from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I knew that the question had been raised, but I didn’t realize it had attracted so much attention back in the day.
The question still lingers. These days the issue seems to have as much to do with distrust of academics, who aren’t much interested in the question, as it does with the state of the rather meager evidence. Bardiac considers the issue in four posts, with comments by some anti-Strafordians. Here’s the fourth post, with links to the earlier three.
UPDATE: Comments are closed, but are listed below the fold.
Reading Comics Event: Exaggeration
This post is going to change the way you think about comics, graphic novels and the visual arts. Forever.
In Reading Comics Wolk makes a good fist of characterizing two dominant comic styles: the ‘Marvel style’ and the anti-Marvel stylings of the comics artists who reacted against those influential visual conventions. The ‘Marvel’ style (Wolk also calls it ‘the standard style’ and ‘generic mainstream drawing’) is ‘designed to read clearly and to evoke the strongest possible somatic response … people and models are partly abstracted and partly modeled, but always within a framework of representation.’ It is ‘quasi-realistic’, a ‘realism pumped up a little, into something whose every aspect is cooler and sexier than the reality we readers are stuck with.’ [50]. So, not just muscles, but enormous muscles everywhere rendered so that every bulge and dip is egregiously visible. Not just a woman in a swimsuit, but a woman with jarringly enormous secondary-sexual characteristics in an improbably figure-hugging and tiny costume. (Neal Adams’ style, for instance, is ‘photorealist’; but it is, nonetheless, an exaggerated photorealism, ‘a pumped-up sort of photorealism, full of very beautiful people, accurate or at least convincing anatomy … and freaky perspectives that heightened the drama’ [51-2] ) You get the idea.
Wolk then discusses those comics, particularly from the 70s and 80s (to today), that were produced in direct reaction against this style: the RAW artists, Spiegelman, Mouly and the like. More broadly Wolk characterizes the reaction against the Marvel style as a deliberate ‘uglification’, though he adds: ‘when I talk about “ugly” cartooning here , I don’t necessarily mean that it repels the eye—most of what I’m talking about is actually pretty compelling … I just mean that it’s the result of a conscious choice to involve a lot of distortion and avoid conventional prettiness of style.’ So the poles, in a nutsell, are: Style A, exaggeratedly beautiful or muscular representation; or Style B, exaggeratedly ugly or raw. There’s your comic art, right there.
That word—exaggeration—is not one that Wolk uses himself. But that was the word that kept chiming in my head as I read his account, and increasingly I found myself wondering if it wasn’t also the thorn stuck so gratingly into the tender soft tissue of my Organ of Comics Appreciation. Does it all have to be so exaggerated? As it might be: not men and women, but heroes; indeed, not heroes but superheroes. Not the moral greys or quotidian human interaction but polarized Good and Evil on a cosmic scale. Not ordinary grit and grime but Robert Crumb’s exaggerated horriblenesses. There are comics, of course, that aim for visual or narrative reticence, and Wolk discusses some of them, but the impression of reading his book right through is that such comics are a minority feature of the whole; that exaggeration is the warp and woof of Comics as a mode (look at the size of Wonder Woman’s boobs! Look at the length of the complete Cerebus the Aardvark!). And that, moreover, it is a bludgeoning, wearying and counter-productive aesthetic strategy.
One word for exaggeration is caricature. Another word is boasting. That first sentence of this post, up top there, is in one sense ‘an exaggeration’. Or as we might say: a lie.
This is not a good ground for art.
Two things occur to me: one is that, perhaps, the exaggerative aspect of comics styling is part of a larger cultural logic: that, in other words, the visual arts in the twentieth-century followed a logic of aesthetic exaggeration—the representational distortions and caricatures of Picasso, the exaggerated scale and simplicity of Rothko—until a state is reached where exaggeration becomes impossible to escape (so, for example, we might argue that photorealism is precisely exaggeratedly mimetic, and so on). But I’m not sure how persuaded I am by this line. A great deal of twentieth-century visual art, surely, works by understatement, obliqueness, reticence.
The other thing that occurs to me is that aesthetic exaggeration is a peacock’s tail phenomenon. Look at these individuals and their exaggeratedly spray-tanned faces (did they really think they looked good?). Thomas Sherman, there, notes that ‘an aesthetic arms race is taking place’ in the small world of these kids. His photos are ‘examples of what anthropologists describe as display behavior, expressive or stylistic behavior engaged in for competitive advantages, most notably in the areas of courtship and threat.’ Comics is a small world, oversupplied with texts, a hothouse in which visual traits get amplified in an attempt to snag the attention of readers. Bigger! Bigger still! More exaggerated! It is the result of courtship behaviour over several generations; comics that are saying, in their various ways, not: ‘judge me aesthetically!’ or even ‘buy me!’ but, more simply, ‘love me!’ Too, too needy: I am not courted.
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July 17
AP Profile of Cary Nelson at Helm of AAUP: “It’s Like Poetry”
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Ernst Benjamin says Nelson’s tendencies as a “born rebel” sometimes run up against the constraints of running an organization. But he insists the energy he provides is also essential.
“It’s like poetry, isn’t it?” Benjamin said, comparing Nelson’s AAUP and scholarly work. “You have to have creativity and you have to have discipline.”
And Benjamin said anyone who had produced 25 books, as Nelson has, “has to have some discipline.”
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July 16
Young Man With Another Man’s Horn
I suppose I was somewhere between 11 and 13 years old when I saw Young Man With a Horn on TV. It had a powerful effect on me. I played trumpet, not terribly well in any absolute sense, though I was pretty good for my age. And I was discovering jazz.
A movie about a jazz trumpet player was thus a natural. The actual trumpet playing was superb, as it was done by Harry James, a man who knew the craft—though I didn’t know much about him at the time. The film starred Kirk Douglas as Rick Martin and told a standard tale of conflict between the requirements of commercial success and the need for artistic freedom. It also told a standard tale of a man caught between a mysterious woman who’s no good for him and the wholesome woman who’s just what he needs, though he doesn’t find that out until he’s all but destroyed himself pursuing the mystery woman.
But this essay is mostly about the music, not the romance. And about the racial characterization, not only of the music, but, by implication, of one’s soul, one’s inner self. But let’s hold off on that for a moment while I continue to wax nostalgic.
There’s a scene early in the film where Rick Martin is sitting in bed playing his trumpet while his teacher looks on. I thought this was so cool that, as soon as the movie was over, I went up to my room, sat in my bed, and played my trumpet. That’s how it got me. I soon discovered, however, that cool though it may have looked, sitting in bed is no way to play the trumpet. It makes breathing and breath support difficult. Without breath, the trumpet is nothing. I thus learned to be skeptical about what you see in movies.
End of digression. This is not about what I learned from this movie when I was a kid. This is about how the movie staged the social relations of jazz.
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Lindon Barrett, RIP
Earlier today, I learned a man I rarely agreed with had been murdered. Seven years ago, Lindon Barrett had the gall to inform me—a grad student at the institution in which he held tenure—that I was full of shit. I dealt in "useless abstraction," to quote from his comments on my seminar paper, and I hated him for writing that.
He was, of course, absolutely correct.
The man loved to argue, but he gave you room and time enough to state your case. But the combativeness of the seminar room relented in office hours, as when I went to speak to him about my paper on "Rip Van Winkle" and the legacy of American slavery. (To reiterate: I was full of shit.) His voice barely above a whisper—he had lectured earlier, he said, and lost it reading Frederick Douglas too enthusiastically—he helped bring order to my swirling mess of thought.
I’ve been reading the comments posted elsewhere tonight, so I don’t want this to sound like a criticism, but I can’t help but remember how Barrett responded to a short paper I turned in on Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States: "Sentiment is a ruse."
And I’d fallen for it.
I was the white guy who read anti-slavery tracts and felt damn fine about himself for bravely opposing slavery a hundred years after the fact. Barrett told me I should’ve turned my attention to the racist logic underlying the self-congratulatory victory laps I was running, but I was young and possessed an abiding faith in the epicness of my egalitarianism.
He was, of course, absolutely correct.
I still think he was wrong about a host of other things, but tonight I dispose any particular disagreements we may have had, to say plainly, with thunder, I wish we’d had the opportunity to have them.
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July 15
Summer Reading Project: Adam Bede (Chapters 22-26)
This week’s installment of Adam Bede brings us to the birthday feast for Arthur Donnithorne, the ‘young squire,’ complete with speeches, drinking, and, of course, dancing:
Pity it was not a boarded floor! Then the rhythmic stamping of the thick shoes would have been better than any drums. That merry stamping, that gracious nodding of the head, that waving bestowal of the hand--where can we see them now? That simple dancing of well covered matrons, laying aside for an hour the cares of house and dairy, remembering but not affecting youth, not jealous but proud of the young maidens by their side--that holiday sprightliness of portly husbands paying little compliments to their wives, as if their courting days were come again--those lads and lasses a little confused and awkward with their partners, having nothing to say--it would be a pleasant variety to see all that sometimes, instead of low dresses and large skirts, and scanning glances exploring costumes, and languid men in lackered boots smiling with double meaning.
Wiry Ben’s hornpipe deserves notice as well:
Have you ever seen a real English rustic perform a solo dance? Perhaps you have only seen a ballet rustic, smiling like a merry countryman in crockery, with graceful turns of the haunch and insinuating movements of the head. That is as much like the real thing as the ‘Bird Waltz’ is like the song of birds. Wiry Ben never smiled: he looked as serious as a dancing monkey--as serious as if he had been an experimental philosopher ascertaining in his own person the amount of shaking and the varieties of angularity that could be given to the human limbs.
I wonder: can we take the varied reactions to Wiry Ben’s performance as indicative of some of the larger historical currents running through the feast more generally and through the novel as a whole? Most of his audience responds with “abundant laughter”; Mrs Poyser remarks that “the gentry” are “fit to die wi’ laughing,” while Arthur attempts to compensate by clapping and cheering. Only Martin Poyser sincerely appreciates his dancing: “I used to be a pretty good un at dancing myself when I was lighter, but I could niver ha’ hit it just to th’hair like that.” The whole birthday sequence seems to me to hum with tension between nostalgia and a Scott-like sense of the inevitability of historical change, between continuity and transformation, between sentiment and irony. At the center of it, of course, is Arthur himself: his consciousness of wrongdoing (and our knowledge of it) is rot at the heart of the community. Even without noticing that the first chapter in next week’s installment is called “A Crisis,” we can’t simply enjoy the party because we know too much.
As far as I can tell, there are about 7 stalwart souls who are both reading and commenting. If there are more of you out there reading along, please feel free to add your thoughts, questions, insights, curiosities, objections, perplexities, or anything else to the discussion. The more the merrier!
To review the overall plan and schedule, see here. Previous discussions have covered Chapters 1-5, Chapters 6-11, Chapters 12-16, and Chapters 17-21.
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