This lengthy novel covers the troubled – and as it develops, pre-ordained, – lives of Maggie Tulliver, a clever “dark” girl, and her older brother Tom in their rural English village. Like his father, Tom is dim, unimaginative, and frequently unkind (but not unloving) to his devoted sister. But Maggie, the central character, embodies the central problem of the novel. Except when it comes to Tom, she has a pronounced and offbeat mind of her own, beginning with one of the novel’s first scenes in which as a very small child she regularly retreats into the cold, cobwebby attic in her father’s mill to punish a “fetish” for her misfortunes by driving nails into its head.
Unfortunately, almost half of the novel passes before there is any glimmer of a plot. Like Hardy in Under the Greenwood Tree (q.v.) Eliot delivers such well-observed dialogue that she has forgotten that there must be a reason other than the simple appreciation of her art to keep the reader reading. The plot, which takes almost forever to get going, commences with Maggie’s secret admiration and Platonic love for the criped and decent son of her father’s (and brother’s) enemy. Obsessed with some riparian dispute, Maggie’s father has “gone to law” with the formidable enemy and in consequence lost his mill to him. In a somewhat begrudging fashion, the large Tulliver family of uncles, aunts, and cousins provides succor. The comparison to Hardy, somberness included, is not entirely satisfying, however. Eliot exercises her humor far more frequently, often in pungent asides. Describing the pre-adolescent Tom in a conversation with one of his uncles, for example, Eliot notes,
“A boy’s sheepishness is by no means a sign of overmastering reverence; and while you are making encouraging advances to him under the idea that he is overwhelmed by a sense of your age and wisdom, ten to one he is thinking you extremely queer. The only consolation I can suggest to you is, that the Greek boys probably thought the same of Aristotle.”
When one of the aunts is spoiling for a breakfast table argument with her husband, she makes the tea weak and declines the butter because “[p]eople who seem to enjoy their ill-temper have a way of keeping it in fine condition by inflicting privations on themselves.”
But the novel is noteworthy in that its grim story, with the climax foreshadowed throughout, nevertheless becomes virtually an essay on love by its conclusion. At the end, Maggie is unfairly compromised by a new man with whom she has unexpectedly fallen in love. She refuses to yield to the happy ending which she could have by marrying him. Her statement becomes the theme of the novel:
“‘Oh, it is difficult – life is very difficult! It seems right to me that we should sometimes follow our strongest feeling; but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us . . . . [T]here are things we must renounce in life; some of us must resign love. . . . Love is natural; but surely pity and fathfulness and memory are natural too.’”
George Eliot, Middlemarch --
Since I have always loved the detail and pace of Victorian novels, I can't explain my indifference to this prime example of the species as simply being a novel for a different reader. On the other hand I also can't explain why I never much cared about anything that was going on. This is supposed to be Eliot’s greatest novel. She is insightful, periodically witty, and in full control of her material. She is also not bad at dialogue, but I think she must be overfond of it, because its authenticity is often lost in its details. Compare Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy, both of whom seem to have an equally good ear, but also a much more immediate purpose every time they use a quotation mark.
As for plot, there is one in the same sense that there is one in The Mill On The Floss, which is to say that it eventually emerges from the mist of detail and dialogue -- and relative absence of incident -- that open the novel. What we are shown in Middlemarch is a prosperous, complacent midlands town, circa 1829, in its way a precursor of Gopher Prairie, although Eliot is much kinder than Sinclair Lewis ever was. This is a region in transition brought on by the recent manufacturing prosperity throughout England. A railroad will soon be put through. It is also the time of the first Reform Bill, the politics of which figures slightly in the plot. The central characters are essentially from three families whose fortunes eventually intertwine. First there is the main heroine, Dorthea Brooke, an intelligent but somewhat overeager young woman who makes a foolish marriage to a pedantic cleric 30 years older than she, almost exclusively because of her naive belief that he is wise and profound. (His unfinished book is “A Key to All Mythologies,” ambitious in scope but premised on a fallacy.) Also from Middlemarch is the Vincy family, particularly the beautiful Rosamund and her good natured but feckless brother Fred. Third are the Garths, particularly Mary, plain but wise, and her father, an estate manager who works for hire. (From what I know of Eliot’s biography, I fancy that these latter two are derived from the author and her own father.)
The first third of the novel spends a good deal of time describing Rosamund’s growing infatuation with Dr. Tertius Lydgate, a new arrival in Middlemarch, with a far more sensible approach to medicine than the rural practitioners – who naturally come to despise him for his innovations. All of this sounds like Jane Austen from a generation before, but it is no criticism of either author to say that they clearly had different purposes and that the passage of time in Middlemarch would have furnished Austen with several novels. In many instances, Eliot writes with more color than Jane, who would not, for example, have written, “the frigid rhetoric . . . was as sincere as the bark of a dog, or the cawing of an amorous rook.” And she certainly would not have produced this:
“Night and day, without interruption save of brief sleep which only wove retrospect and fear into a fantastic present, he felt the scenes of his earlier life coming between him and everything else, as obstinately as when we look through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn our backs on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees.”
But both authors do share a pert insight and I can hear Austen as well as Eliot remark, “But Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gate.”
While I am in the comparison business, I suppose I had better acknowledge the unwelcome surprise I felt toward the end of the novel when a Bronte showed up to write this uncharacteristic passage:
“While he was speaking there came a vivid flash of lightening which lit each of them up for the other – and the light seemed to be the terror of hopeless love. Dorthea darted instantaneously from the window; Will followed her, seizing her hand with a spasmodic movement; and so they stood, with their hands clasped, like two children, looking out on the storm, while the thunder gave a tremendous crack and roll above them, and the rain began to pour down.”
But this happens only once, and the book immediately regains its balance. As usual,
Eliot is concerned with religion, particularly its newer manifestations, and she also illustrates (without necessarily endorsing) the enormous respect in which men of the cloth were held in Victorian times. Eventually, in the last quarter, Eliot treats her readers to a mystery, quickly resolved, which permits each of the main characters to come into the sharpest focus -- including their ambiguities, which is one of Eliot's best trademarks. (Dickens, by contrast, would have wound this puzzle like a snake throughout both volumes of the novel.) We learn the enigmatic background of Will Ladislaw, the man whom Dorthea would have loved under other circumstances, but whose pride and sensitive nature takes him out of her life. By the end, Eliot has concluded that God's in His heaven, all's right with the world. Nothing really happened, as I said at the outset, but it is a condition in which the author takes comfort.
“[F]or the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
George Eliot, Adam Bede --
But for an unsatisfying conflict resolution and a tedious ending, this is the best of Eliot's long novels. All of her strong points are on display (a good ear for dialogue, an observant eye for detail) plus she avoids the slow, slow start that weighs down The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch.
The story (an eternal triangle) is not extraordinary, but like Hardy, whose geometric figures are usually more complex, Eliot seems to be very much in touch with the life of simple folk. By itself, the instinct to tell common stories about common men is not particularly wonderful -- you certainly won't find it in Shakespeare -- but as a devotee of technique I am never indifferent to verisimilitude. Included in the verisimilitude package, incidentally, is another interesting feature which I have not been aware of in Eliot's other novels -- an apparently conscious effort to make her readers believe that she is a man without her ever having said so. It occurs in the asides, when she remarks (usually accurately) about how men or women feel in certain circumstances. (Like most Victorians, however, Eliot seems to accept the unlikely notion that an unloved man will stand a noble and silent guard over his beloved for an indefinite time.) Things are quite different in these politically correct times in which only women are said to be able to write with empathy about women, blacks about blacks, etc. But this is nonsense and Eliot is a good example of an earlier and better understanding of the artist's role.
One unusual feature of this novel, though not overstressed, is the modest subtext about the Methodist movement in rural England. It also seems interesting to me that Eliot, who certainly led an unconventional life of her own, seems to accept the very conventions that she herself shrugged off. The Victorian dismay at cross-class romances and non-marital liaisons, for example, is not merely the conflict in Adam Bede, it is the uncriticized fabric of the novel. Compare both The Scarlet Letter or Tess of the D'Urbervilles in which there is the aroma of criticism which I cannot detect here.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man –
During the same week that I was reading this novel for the first time, I happened on an article in which a critic was reflecting on how some artists – he had in mind a playwright – write their best work too early in their careers, and spend the rest of their lives trying to come up with something equally great. He gave Invisible Man as a parallel example.
Unfortunately it’s not a great novel, though I had certainly hoped it would be. It begins as an interesting story, suggesting a strong plot, but it soon becomes episodic, and then obliquely tendentious long before the end. In fact, the tendentiousness sinks it entirely, although I surmise – particularly based on the epilogue – that Ellison would not have thought what he did was tendentious. I’ll come to that, but here the point is that for tendentious novels even to have a chance, they must have both a strong plot and vivid characters of the sort that Ayn Rand could deliver. But episodic novels are often at war with anything but the most conventional plots (The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Three Musketeers) and novelized biographies (e.g. Barry Lyndon) will frequently suffer the same defects. Both lack a sustained uniform tension to keep the reader wondering about the unresolved question.
The “Invisible Man” of the title is the nameless American Negro narrator of the story, the story being his life as it unfolds over the first half of the 20th Century. His strengths and disillusions are the core theme of the narrative, but the absence of any other continuing characters of any dimension ultimately undermines anything compelling in the plot. We get a brief and uncomfortable glimpse of his Jim Crow life as a youth (a “battle royal” among blindfolded black boys at a something like southern Rotary Club meeting) and then a longer episode of his betrayal by the president at his Tuskeegee-like college when he innocently tries to help a white trustee in trouble. He is unjustly expelled and moves to New York where, after a pointless episode or two, he comes to rest in Harlem.
The narrator is a natural leader with, as he discovers, a persuasive speaking style. He is compassionate and observant, but he also develops a cynical streak. Once in Harlem, he is placed in contrast to the rabble-rousing hater, Ras The Exhorter, a Jamaican immigrant who urges black violence against the white man. Ras, the narrator says, held him “responsible for all the nights and days and all the suffering and for all that I was incapable of controlling, and I no hero, but short and dark with only a certain eloquence and a bottomless capacity for being a fool.”
Indeed, the narrator has taken his own more “moderate” course, joining a manque communistic “Brotherhood” whose members speak earnestly about a “scientific” approach to solving social problems. But the “brothers” are an uninteresting lot, mostly white. They sound – although I don’t think this was the intention of the author – much like the self-deluding “limousine liberals” of the 1960s. They spend their time organizing, discussing vague politics, and printing up fliers for distribution around town. But they are blinded by their own self-importance, lack of imagination, and rigidness, just as earlier episodes in the book illustrate how everyone else, black or white, will also eventually overlook the larger problems in favor of his own situation. No one ever fully sees anyone else – and for that matter the brotherhood leader, more for plot reasons than anything else, actually tries to make surreptitious use of the narrator for his own larger purposes.
As a plot device, this actually fails, although it does have a certain thematic usefulness. Better are two somewhat metaphorical devices. First, throughout the book the narrator seems to carry with him the briefcase which he was awarded as a prize for his humiliating success at the “battle royal” and in which he keeps various tokens of his life. More could have been made of this, both at the narrative and at the thematic level, but the idea is interesting. Second, at one point the plot obliges the narrator to don a wide-brimmed “pimp”-style hat and dark glasses, resulting in his being routinely confused throughout the neighborhood with “Rinehart,” evidently a formidable character whom he does not resemble internally at all. The innate humor of the Rinehart confusion could have been stressed more, but Elison is a bit too earnest, I think, in using the never seen doppelganger only as a foil.
Invisible Man culminates with a Harlem race riot which brings on the inevitable epiphany,
“I . . . recognized the absurdity of the whole night and of the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running, and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine. . . . And I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others . . . .”
As insight, this is pretty weak tea. Out of a riot emerges disillusionment and absurdity? This is not the stuff of great novels. Furthermore, the narrator then closes the story as he literally plunges into a dark hole where he remains until writing his story. The novel thus ends, but with the aforementioned epilogue tacked on.
The epilogue is not helpful to the novel, although it may have ben personally helpful to the author. It is almost painful to listen to Ellison, still in the voice of the narrator, try to synthesize what he has written with what he has concluded. That’s because, even after all of his efforts, he has not come to a coherent conclusion, though he certainly has tried. Like his narrator, Ellison seems ambivalent about who he is and where his observations have taken him. In the epilogue he strikes notes of anger, love, confusion, reconciliation, and maturity but cannot come to rest on any of them. As a human predicament, that is poignant and not uncommon, but by putting this in the epilogue, Ellison is still in the novel. Some of the best novels soar on ambiguity, of course, but that is not what was called for here.
What Invisible Man is, therefore, is less of a novel than it is a heartfelt essay with novelistic features. Among the most prominent of those features is the concept of invisibility itself. It’s a good idea, but is somehow, notwithstanding all of the references, it never quite makes itself entirely clear. If “invisible man” just refers to no more than the narrator, in other words, it has some integrity, though not enough to justify the implications of the title. If it is intended to be a wider metaphor for American Negroes in general (which is what a reader might believe in picking up the book), it doesn’t succeed in making the larger generalization.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying --
I read this book for the first time in my fifties and it reminded me again that someone once said that certain books are to be read at certain ages of one's life. As I Lay Dying was not meant for a man in his fifties, though I'm sure that I would have found it a great hit in my twenties. There is an unavoidable Gothic humor to it and probably more symbolism than I had time to explore. I did admire the scene of the two naked young men wrestling against the backdrop of the burning barn, though Faulkner, gratuitously I think, expressly compares it to a Greek frieze.
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom --
Faulkner's debt to Joyce is well-chronicled, but until now I had not realized that he is equally indebted to Conrad. For the most part, he tells this tale in the long past tense by means of dreamy, elaborate, unreal monologues using several narrators. It is impossible not to think of Marlow on deck, sitting in the dark and spinning an unhurried story of other times and places. The language of these characters is almost baroque, not only because of the stream of consciousness syntax but also for the vocabulary they use -- a poet's vocabulary which comes out of these characters' mouths with complete credibility. In fact, the only way I can read the monologues is to approach them as though they were poetry and not expect a linear and grammatical report on what happened.
As I read the book, I found myself making a family tree just so I could remember the relationship of the characters and was still working on it by the time I had reached the end. One passage particularly stands out in my mind, possibly because it was so helpful in confirming what I had already divined: Quentin and his father visit the cedar grove at Sutpen's Hundred where the family tombstones are set up with the dates of deaths, etc. As with virtually every other important scene in the book, this one both explains some mysteries and raises others, and this one was particularly interesting because in a book which is so subjective and poetic, Faulkner uses this objective moment to clarify without ever changing his tone.
I also venture another observation: if the first scene of a play is vital to getting the audience alert and involved, the first chapter of a book serves the same office. But the first chapter of Absalom, Absalom is more than that; it is breathtaking. To jump to the end, however, I wish it had not been so lurid. It was unfortunately predictable and permits this wonderful novel to be classified as "southern Gothic."
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury --
Written several years before Absalom, Absalom, this novel should nevertheless really be read second. I did read it a few months after Absalom, but alas too much time had passed for it to help much.
To over simplify, The Sound and the Fury continues the story of the Comson family, whose members appeared more as observers than actors in Absalom. Here they are the central characters, including the young man Quentin, tortured in Absalom, doomed here. We also meet characters unmentioned in the earlier book, especially Benjy, the retarded first narrator whose story gives the title to the novel, and Caddy, sister of the two, loved unnaturally by each as they navigate their own shadow worlds. Benjy and Quentin narrate the first half of the book in their own streams of consciousness; the third section is taken over by the shrewd and unscrupulous Jason Comson whose small town meanness Faulkner captures exactly. Jason is also sarcastic, jealous, and petty. (Quite funny too, I find.) The final part, Dilsey’s account, is told in the third person, but from the perspective of the household servant.
“[T]o be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience: people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect. . . . . [B]ut at the first flicker of doubt as to its all-inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done.”
The story is a lengthy illustration of that evaluation, including Dick’s own slow realization of its truth.
Diver’s coterie includes his younger wife Nicole and a variety of other beautiful, lost generation Americans living in Europe on no apparent income but plenty of style. Rosemary’s mother, awfully indulgent considering the circumstances, permits her daughter to join the group in Paris. Picking up the ancient theme of Americans confronting Europe, Fitzgerald remarks upon the differences between the women in the group and other American women:
“[T]hey were all happy to exist in a man’s world – they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would . . . have made alternatively good courtesans and good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.”
But later in the novel Dick (he is a medical doctor, practicing as a psychologist) is obliged to treat a “fine-spun, inbred” American woman with an indefinable ailment and agonizing pain, who tells him that she is sharing “the fate of women of my time who challenged men to battle.” She might find rest in some “quiet mysticism,” but she will never explore the “frontiers of consciousness”; that kind of exploration was for those “with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.” The women in this novel are not of that sort.
This is France after the Great War. Beneath the endless nights and hazy days, the parties, assignations, the drinking, and the irresponsibility, there is always an undercurrent of sadness and death suggested by the book’s title. After about a third of the novel, there is a sudden act of violence followed by another. At this point the reader is poised to see the events as landmarks of the plot, But they are not . They are thematic only. Part One ends.
Part Two gives what is currently called the “backstory.” We learn that Diver, born in the American South, Yale educated, son of a clergyman, met Nicole as a teenaged psychiatric patient in a Swiss clinic, probably just as the war ended. She had been sexually abused by her wealthy father and falls in love with the dashing young doctor almost as a matter of course. But Dick, in the meantime, had already found that “he had only one or two ideas – that his little collection of pamphlets . . . contained the germ of all he would ever think or know.” And now some years later he has also fallen in love with Rosemary, though has married Nicole – she of the “perishable beauty” – who owns Dick “who did not want to be owned.”
Nicole has lengthy periods of remission, of which the first part of the book is an extended example. But Fitzgerald is certainly up to portraying her dismaying interludes of madness, doubly horrifying for the father of her children who is also her psychologist. And yet as the novel progresses, Nicole’s exasperating madness comes to have a greater authenticity than Dick’s effortless gift with people.
“A ‘schizophrene’ is well named as a split personality – Nicole was alternatively a person to whom nothing need be explained and one to whom nothing could be explained. . . . But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike.”
Book Two ends with another act of violence, this time closer to home. Having briefly escaped Nicole by attending a conference, Dick receives her telegram that his father has died in America. He immediately departs alone to the funeral and returns to Europe circuitously, encountering Rosemary in Rome more or less by accident, five years after they have last seen each other. And now, “[w]hat had begun with a childish infatuation on a beach was accomplished at last.”
But Dick is in decline and disengaged. He refuses to follow up and instead gets himself drunk, arrested, and – after assaulting a policeman – badly beaten. He is rescued by Nicole’s imperious sister who “had the satisfaction of feeling that, whatever Dick’s previous record was, they now possessed a moral superiority over him for as long as he proved of any use.” And he has degenerated so obviously into alcoholism that even Nicole, for whom he had been the anchor, becomes annoyed and disdainful of him.
By Book Three Nicole has seen Dick flirt with suicide, has divined (without much caring) that he has conducted an intermittent affair with Rosemary, and has had her own liaison with one of the interchangeable men who pop in and out of their lives during the course of the novel. Their connection is broken. Nicole remarries and Dick retreats to America and becomes smaller and smaller.
It is a sad novel and, as I said, modest.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary --
Why does Flaubert begin this novel as though he is going to tell a first person narrative like The Brothers Karamazov and then almost immediately drop it? Nothing I have read in the way of criticism of the novel has mentioned this, and yet it seems to me to be a flaw[1]. Indeed, it could be said to be the novel’s only flaw– as opposed to the sorry people depicted in it.
Even stipulating, as Cardinal Newman does, that great literature must necessarily deal with flawed, sinful people, I have never warmed to this novel of petit bourgeois adultery. Emma Bovary is not Anna Karenina. She is not tortured by guilt and injustice, or even by genuine love, as might be said of Anna. Instead, Emma suffers from an overheated imagination, fed by novels including Walter Scott (she is not clever enough for poetry) and her own uninformed and ignorant understanding of reality. “She loved the sea only for its storms, green foliage only when it was scattered amid ruins.” And elsewhere:
“[S]he confounded gilded sensuality with heart’s delight, elegance of manner with delicacy of feeling. . . . Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, hands at parting bathed with tears, all the fevers of the flesh and the languid tenderness of love – these could not be separated from the balconies of stately mansions, the life of leisure, the silk-curtained boudoir with a good thick carpet, full flower-bowls and a bed on a raised dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder-knots on servants’ livery.”
As a young girl in a convent, this excess of feeling had made her an unthinking servant of the virgin (the candles, veils, and columns were charming), until the rigors of religion had ultimately been pressed upon her and she put it aside without a care. Yes, it is plausible that Flaubert found himself falling in love with Emma even as he despised the petty society in which she lived. I don’t think this means he found her admirable. It means that he too was seduced by her foolish imagination and imagined beauty. A man would fall in love with Emma – for all of the silly reasons that make love such a dangerous commodity in man/woman relationships. Flaubert tells how beautiful she is, and in the French way he finds her more beautiful as she gets older. She has narrow nostrils, luscious, cascading, dark hair, and her eyes become half-closed fluttering slits when she thinks of love. But Emma’s curse, as she would see it, is that she was born into a rural, iron-bound world so constricted that, as an avenue of escape, she thinks, she marries a plodding country doctor. (If she had had her way, it would have been “a midnight wedding with torches.”)
In a sense of extreme importance to Flaubert, but not to me, Charles Bovary is Emma’s opposite in one major respect. He is utterly devoid of imagination, nor is this compensated for by other virtues such as George Eliot might have discerned in a provincial rustic. Indeed, as a doctor, he is incompetent. In one of the few important incidents of the novel not involving Emma, Charles is intimidated by Homais, the village chemist, into performing a disastrous operation on a stablehand with a club foot. The poor fellow nearly dies and loses his entire leg, all in the name of Homais’s notions of local boosterism. For Homais is the villain of the piece – or rather he is the exemplar of the broader villain, the French petty bourgeoisie. He is full of modern platitudes ( “You can praise God just as well in the woods and the fields, or by gazing up into the vault of heaven”) and, though he has nothing in common with Emma, at her death conjures up ideas for her grave which are remarkably like those she would have dreamed on.
The plot is almost predictable. Emma, excruciatingly bored with her husband, permits Leon, a young man from the village about to leave for studies in Paris, to open a flirtation with her so obvious anyone but the stupid husband can see it. It comes to nothing and when Leon leaves, Emma is presently seduced by a neighboring bourgeois gentleman, Rodolfe, who is well-off but little more than cynical about this delightful opportunity. His opening gambit by itself is supremely calculated to win the day: he tells her that souls like theirs -- “of utter purity,” of course -- must be ever in turmoil with adventures and escapades. “She gazed at him than as one might gaze at a traveler who has journeyed through strange lands.” But Rodolfe is not delighted with the extravagant Emma’s entirely serious but obviously insane plan to elope with him in style (and magic) to God knows where. The “eternal monotony of passion” having set in, he calmly jilts her at the moment of departure, launching her into illness and greater mental instability. It lasts over a year.
When Leon eventually returns to work as a law clerk in nearby Rouen, he opens an absurdly risky affair with her which requires her to journey to the city once a week for an overnight on the pretext to taking piano lessons. He is older, but still callow and “become[s] her mistress rather than she his.” It cannot last -- though Charles remains witlessly innocent of it all -- and Emma eventually must confront the fact that throughout the madness of it all she has spent her family into bankruptcy. She ends her life by consuming arsenic which she finds in Homais’s shop. Flaubert attenuates her miserable death through many pages, including the grotesque moment when the priest, preparing to administer the last rites, presents her with a crucifix.
“Reaching forward like one in thirst, she glued her lips to the body of the Man-God and laid upon it with all her failing strength the most mighty kiss of love she had ever given.”
And thus told, Madame Bovary is a soap opera. And yet it is not that. Even reading it in English translation, I can see how lushly and cleverly written it is. There are little touches and large.
“The fresh air played around her, ruffling up stray wisps of hair at the nape of her neck, setting the strings of her apron dancing and fluttering like streamers at her hips.” A famous scene is Leon’s planned seduction in Rouen, commenced during a tour of the Cathedral in the presence of an officious and obtuse guide; Emma is determined to resist and has even prepared a note of disengagement which she has committed herself to deliver; equally determined, Leon calls a carriage which they enter (because “it is done in Paris”) with shades drawn to our eyes, and the day concludes with a gloveless hand emerging from the curtained window spreading tiny torn up bits of paper which flutter to the ground like "butterflies." (Nabokov noticed too.)
I must remark on a vivid and foreboding device that the author employs near the end of the novel. On her trip home from a tryst in Rouen Emma encounters a tramp following the carriage, singing a song of “birds and summertime and green leaves.” But taking off his cap, “he revealed where his eyelids should have been a pair of gaping holes all stained with blood.” Later authors, having displayed this disturbing incident, would not call upon it again. But Flaubert does. For me it does not add to the novel – though Flaubert no doubt felt it emphasized his theme – that this apparition later comes to Emma’s village when she is on her deathbed, hoping to take advantage of Homais’s pompous and ridiculous offer to cure him.
Endnotes
1. And yet Flaubert so famously took care of the utmost details of what he wrote, it was obviously a deliberate choice.
E.M. Forster, A Passage To India --
They say that Forster got his title for this sad novel from Walt Whitman. If so, I am unfamiliar with the exact source. But for my purposes, he may as well have taken the idea directly from Joseph Conrad, who was a master of such double titles.
The novel glides smoothly along its distinct plot which has to do with an honorable but feckless Indian Moslem being unfairly accused of "insulting" a young English woman whom he was trying to impress. This is at all times interesting. But the plot's chief use is as Forster's vehicle for illustrating and commenting upon the misunderstandings and cross purposes -- as he puts it, the "muddles" -- that are always afoot in India. In that sense it is a comment on ("a passage to") India and its poignancy reminds me somewhat of Cry The Beloved Country. Unlike Kipling, Forster refrains from superficial judgments. He fully illustrates and actually sympathizes with how and why the British came to see themselves as bearing "the white man's burden," though he is by no means satisfied with that solution -- and he appears to have no solution of his own.
As close as he comes is in his central character, Mrs. Moore, who comments matter-of-factly, "God is love." Initially she appears to transcend the culture boundaries. But it turns out to be unsustainable on either side. Unlike Othello, Mrs. Moore dies not baffled, but embittered. And her legacy emerges in a crude Hindu sign mislettered in English for a ceremony at the end of the novel: "God si love."
E. M. Forster, A Room With A View --
Lucy Honeychurch, a beautiful but unformed teenager, visits Florence with her cousin as chaperon. At their pension they agree, on Lucy's urging, to exchange their quarters for those unexpectedly offered by a bohemian Englishman and his son, so that Lucy may have a view of the city. (But her cousin thereupon takes the room with the view.) Later, in an almost dreamlike incident in the hills over Florence, Lucy accidentally encounters the young man as she slips down a hillside of flowers, where he appears, impulsively lifts her up, and kisses her, no words being spoken.
It is one of those events that changes a person's outlook on life -- and is the point at which any chance of our traveling in a Jane Austen direction is finally sealed off. Under circumstances not too artificially contrived, about half a year later the father and son take up residence near the Honeychurch home in England, just after Lucy has become engaged to a young snob who doesn't at all understand her. The story of how she sheds the fiance and eventually comes to the young man is the balance of the plot, though the plot is entirely ancillary to Forster's views of life and everyone's role in it.
The real subject of the book is Forster's deceptively gentle insistence about the necessity of acknowledging the role of love (which he clearly sees as being inherently idiosyncratic and unconventional) in people's lives -- in other words, the same theme he stresses in both Howards End and A Passage To India. And he is clever about using his unusual title to advantage several times in the course of the novel, as in this exchange between Lucy and her fiancé:
"I had got an idea -- I dare say wrongly -- that you feel more at home with me in a room.” "'A room,” she echoed, hopelessly bewildered. "Yes. Or, at the most, in a garden, or on a road. Never in the real country like this.” "Oh, Cecil, whatever do you mean? I have never felt anything of the sort. You talk as if I was a kind of poetess sort of person.” "I don't know that you aren't. I connect you with a view -- a certain type of view. Why shouldn't you connect me with a room?” "Do you know that you're right? I do. I must be a poetess after all. When I think of you it's always as in a room. How funny!"
E.M. Forster, Howards End --
I have read three of Forster's novels. In the beginning (in A Passage to India, the last-written of the three) I was charmed by his gentleness and wisdom. By the time I got to Howards End, however, he had become positively tedious, more worthwhile for his plots than his now over-familiar theme of love as the only worthwhile force in life so long as it is radical and unconventional enough. The love theme, after all, is not so unique that Forster should think, as he clearly does, that it was he who invented it and only he who understands it. (Was he deliberately writing to correct his contemporary, D.H. Lawrence, who had a thing or two of his own to say on the subject?)
This novel presents his theme through the lives of the two clever German/ English Schlegl sisters who become involved with a successful British mercantile family, the Wilcoxes, the wife and mother of whom unexpectedly dies, precipitating, though slowly, the ensuing events. This use of a clarifying event is a sound literary strategy, though I must say that Forster uses it in each of his novels and so it does not seem so fresh when it is encountered once again in the next.
In any event, it did finally became clear to me that it was not an accident in both A Passage To India and A Room With A View that Forster appears to see women as infinitely more interesting and worthy beings than men. They always provide him with a window on what he obviously regards as the genuinely important thing about life, and they are beguilingly superior to such transient matters as politics, empire, commerce, etc. which unaccountably distract the two-dimensional men who appear in his stories. In fact, the thoughts and reflections of the women are presented so lucidly and sympathetically that one can go for a long time without realizing that he has been lectured to -- indeed, hectored -- by Forster for several chapters about how inadequate the reader really is, though he shouldn't despair since Forster likes him quite enough anyway.
The "Howards End" of the title is a farmhouse owned by the Wilcox family in an area adjacent to London rapidly becoming suburbanized. It becomes a symbol of the synthesizing, adaptable love which Forster holds so essential. To call the place a "character" in the novel would be an overstatement, but it is not too much to acknowledge that its significance is great and that it provides exactly the correct title for the book.
A final point about Forster's technique is his mastery of dialogue, so good that he can convey action without ever leaving the quotation mark. In this sense, he is more like a playwright than a novelist, and very, very efficient.
George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman --
The joke in this book is the old one of the coward who becomes a hero because he always seems to end up as the last one standing. But Harry Flashman is not Tom Jones, meaning that the book has a flaw as well as a joke. The Flashman character is derived, Tom Stoppard-like, from a minor character in Tom Brown's School Days who is expelled from Rugby as a slackard and bully. But he is more than that; Flashman is also a rapist without conscience and a would-be murderer. From Scaramouche to Barry Lyndon, protagonist scoundrels can be enjoyed because their worst crimes derive from avarice -- which can be rectified. It is difficult to wink at Flashman's crimes, and there is no particular reason to think that the author would have it so. But if not, why has he written a picaresque novel with wall-to-wall derring do (duels, snake pits, Afghan bandits, etc.)? It's not as though Fraser has more on his mind than Saturday afternoon matinees. To see in the novel the degradation beneath the surface of Victorian adventure stories is to see what is not intended. The mood is not that at all. It is just as I said: Jack the Ripper playing Zorro.
No comments:
Post a Comment