From Emma/Austen to Gwendoline/Eliot to Undine/Wharton.

I can't get over how much I am loving Daniel Deronda. In it, George Eliot keeps making these insane plays on the Austenian marriage market. In a lot of ways Gwendoline Harleth is Eliot's riff on Austen's Emma Woodhouse. But Eliot is very clear to render as present and palpable the socio-economic world Austen only sees on the horizon (of the sea-centric Persuasion): a world defines by the values of the mercantile class. Eliot's Gwendoline, though as pretty and pompous as her Austenian precursor, doesn't enjoy Emma's social and economic security. The Crofts (Persuasion) and the Gardiners (Pride and Prejudice) are running shit now, and when Gwendolyn's family's investments tank, she is forced into a marriage with a decidedly un-Knightly-ish suitor, Grandcourt. Daniel Deronda, with his moralistic "evil eye" that humbles and embarrasses Gwendoline as she gambles, is the Knightly, but without family, money, or station, he is relegated to a Tom Jones:preferred-orphan-of-a-benevolent-nobleman-who-everyone-suspects-is-your-illegitimate-father status. Gwendolyn's ego, her vain obliviousness, and difficulty choosing a decent marriage in a world where someone's value (whether in terms of character or money) does not correlate with their title or appearance strongly prefigures Undine Spragg, the similarly detestable but irresistibly entertaining heroine of Edith Wharton's The Custom and the Country who foolishly pursues title instead of both/either character and/or economic security.

Running a more psychologically rigorous marriage plot through a world where the landed aristocracy have been unseated from the apogee of culture and society by cosmopolitan and mercantile forces, with Daniel Deronda, George Eliot is the ancestral link between Austen and Wharton.

Todorov's The Fantastic, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Deferred Desire

               In The Fantastic (1970/5), Tzvetan Todorov constructs the literary genre of the fantastic in terms of the “hesitation” a narrative provokes in its reader when the events of that narrative break the laws of physics and/or reality as the reader knows them. For Todorov, the entire genre of what contemporary audiences would call “the supernatural” boils down to an interval of time, short or long, wherein the reader and sometimes the protagonist has to question what is “real.” Given that all literature plays on this question, language’s capacity and incapacity to render the truth, and its potential for producing whole new species of truth (“true” within the fictional universe of the story, non-literal figurative images etc.), Todorov, at times, flirts with the idea that the “fantastic” and therefore the supernatural is at the heart of literature generally.

               Dealing in representations that vary in their connection to a lived “reality,” Todorov adds that the fantastic is associated with motifs of abjected, repressed, and marginalized desires. The reader and/or protagonist, inside an interval period where the distinction between real and unreal is up for grabs, can experience a taboo without its repercussions, because, in fact, even when the taboo-ed behavior at least appears to happen, it might not be real. And if it is “real” in some sense then it is cast as horrific and re-abjected. As far as normativity-and-transgression is concerned, the fantastic acts as a zone of plausible deniability and narrative “red light district” where the reader and protagonist might take pleasure in what is elsewhere inconceivable.

               Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the very apex of the Gothic novel, where disembodied voices and ominous music provoke the protagonist, Emily Aubert, to question whether she is being haunted by a ghost, sits firmly within Todorov’s fantastic (41-2). Given that the phenomena that elicit Emily’s hesitation turn out to be generated by forces that do not break any laws of physics, Udolpho represents the “uncanny” sub-species of the genre. The “uncanny,” nowadays, is probably best represented by the modern day children’s gothic, Scooby Doo Where Are  You?, an animated cartoon where at the end of each episode, a rock band of canny (and probably very horny, very perverse) teenagers discover that a given supernatural manifestation is, in fact, the ruse of a very natural, if extraordinarily hokey, criminal mind. If the ghosts in Scooby or Udolpho were in fact real and the supernatural existed beside the natural in its own right, as in The Monk, then Todorov explains, those narratives would participate in the “marvelous.” Either way, the genre’s play within a liminal space where appearance and “reality” are disjointed is a perfect opportunity for representing abjected desires without committing them to or in “reality.”       

               In Udolpho, the abject desires expressed are incest, homosexuality, and rogue heterosexuality. Emily Aubert, upon the death of her mother, shares an especially close relationship to her father that’s sentimental sensuousness borders on the erotic. Emily’s more or less kosher relationship with the young Valancourt doesn't supercede or block but rather re-signifies the incestuous bond between her and her father. Valancourt and Emily’s relationship is rendered in terms of Edenic – read: sinless – sentiment; they appear “like two lovers who had never strayed beyond these their native mountains.” (49) But this Eighteenth century Adam and Eve are not alone in their mountainous, Burke-ean garden. Valancourt, after all, is in fact, St. Aubert’s friend, and the three often wander the mountains together. If Emily and Valancourt are, as the narrative says, a “romantic picture of felicity,” it is Emily’s father that composes the picture, his point of view that gives it its frame. It’s sin and incest – or at least the desire for them - that inscribes and produces sinless sentiment.  

               Like the painter in Las Meninas, St Aubert disappears from his own painting as he is rendering it only occasionally invading his creation when he stops to inspect its progress. If, as Foucault says, Las Meninas’ circular contortion of perspective that captures its own production is emblematic of modernism generally, than perhaps what I am getting at is that Udolpho similarly renders a distinctly “modern” view of desire that positions legitimate desire as surreptitiously produced by an only intermittently visible taboo, which begs the question: Am I trying to pull a “Claude-Levi Strauss” on Anne Radcliffe?”

               If St. Aubert paints the picture of Valancourt and Emily’s relationship, and as the painter, he is positioned outside or at the margins of his own production then Aubert also maintains his presence even when painting (that is: not visible in his own production) WITHIN the painting by rendering the young Valancourt as his own youthful stand-in. “I remember when I was his age,” says Aubert, “and I thought and felt exactly as he does. The world was opening upon me then – it is closing (now).” Given that Aubert describes Valancourt, his daughter’s only suitor, as a younger version of himself, it’s not a huge logical leap to conclude that Aubert, in some way, positions himself as his own daughter’s suitor.

               What’s funny is the way Aubert displaces the kinship taboo with a concern as to age and health. It’s not his paternal relationship to Emily that distinguishes him from Emily’s lover, it is his age, as if to say: “the only reason I’m not hitting on my own daughter is that I am too old for her.” Valancourt isn’t a more appropriate suitor for Emily because he isn’t related to her, he is more appropriate because he is younger. Aubert’s incestuous desire generates and structures a more appropriate heterosexuality via Valancourt-as-proxy and then displaces itself with a less controversial difference, that of age.

               St. Aubert triangulates a relationship between his own younger self, Valancourt, and his daughter in such a way as to express or maybe gratify his incestuous desire for Emily. However, at the same time, Aubert seems to position Emily to triangulate his desire for Valancourt, whose presence he finds especially, errr, stimulating. “There is something in the ardour and ingenousness of youth,” Aubert gushes over Valancourt, “which is pleasing to the contemplation of an old man . . . it is cheering and reviving . . . his mind catches somewhat of the spirit of the season, and his eyes are lighted up with a transient sunshine. Valancourt is the spring to me.” (57) Now, there might be something of the “sweet old man” to St. Aubert’s feelings for Valancourt, but Aubert’s delectation of Valancourt’s mind comes off like Platonic pederasty and his going on about the “transient sunshine” in Valancourt’s eyes gives a distinctly “Death in Venice" kind of feeling. Aubert’s homosocial fondness for Valancourt could plausibly indicate a very sexual desire.

               Aubert’s desire for Valancourt is not seemlessly sublimated through Emily’s desire.  Later on in the text, Emily’s desire will serve as an indirect sign of Aubert’s. After St. Aubert dies, Emily is assigned to the care of her aunt, Madam Cheron. Cheron is pretty vile. She occupies the "corrupt older woman" role so recurrent in early novels of sentiment. Cheron, like Madame Delacourt in Belinda and Mrs. Duval in Evelina, both covets and resents the heroine, Emily’s, youth and innocence. The inter-generational conflict between women – really maybe just jealousy - is a pretty strong through line in these novels, but in Udolpho especially, it serves to high-light the circuits of desire described above. Valancourt, faithful to Emily, pursues her even after her father’s death. But, like a good sentimental heroine, Emily will not receive Valancourt’s advances without the approval of her guardian. And his visit results in her, despite her feelings for him, mostly looking away and blushing. Nevertheless, Cheron ignores Emily’s respectful restraint and tries to make her feel like a heartless whore.    

'So, niece!' said Madame Cheron, casting a look of surprise and

enquiry on Valancourt, 'so niece, how do you do?  But I need not ask,

your looks tell me you have already recovered your loss.'

'My looks do me injustice then, Madame, my loss I know can never be

recovered.'

'Well--well!  I will not argue with you;  I see you have exactly your

father's disposition; and let me tell you it would have been much

happier for him, poor man! if it had been a different one.' (57)

This scene is interesting because Cheron – irrespective of Emily’s selfless and deferent behavior - obviously resents the fact that Emily is attractive to young men like Valancourt, and tries to make her feel the less for it. Cheron, while Valancourt is still in the room, implies that the interest Emily is in fact curbing for Valancourt constitutes wanton disrespect for her father, that Emily does not grieve her father's loss or regret his passing. In short, Cheron tries to make the prospect of Emily’s happiness morally culpable. But this is just cunty bullshit designed to embarrass and shame Emily. And Madame Cheron knows it. Madame Cheron, being able to read Emily’s desire for Valancourt on Emily’s blushed face, is sensitive – if not sentimental – when it comes to desire. It is meaningful then, that at the same moment that Cheron clocks Emily’s desire for Valancourt, she says “I see you have exactly your father’s disposition.” If Aubert positioned Emily as his proxy in creating a romantic triangulation with Valancourt, then Cheron does the equal and opposite operation, identifying Emily’s desire (for Valancourt) as shared with her father. On one level, Cheron is saying, yes, Emily and her father share the “disposition of sensibility” Cheron so loathes. But in another, more indirect, more Sedgwick-ian way, Cheron is marking Emily and her father’s shared disposition towards young men. The importance of the indirect, the negative, and the ambiguous trace of a queerness sequestered in all kinds of epistemological binds, closets, and silences from overt expression is a consistent theme in queer theory from Sedgwick’s foundational Epistemology of the Closet to Amy Villarejo's cutting edge Lesbian Rule, and Cheron’s monstrously cutting stunt is just such an indirect, elliptical reading. Not only is Emily a horrible daughter and a blush-marked whore, Cheron is saying, but her dead father was a similarly blushing queer.     

               Of course, Aubert’s triangulated and sublimated homosexuality is subject to a narcissistic slippage. If Aubert positions Valancourt as his own youthful self in terms of his daughter and then positions his daughter as a proxy for enacting his romantic feelings for Valancourt then Aubert is, by extension, also expressing a desire for his own youthful self. St. Aubert’s two triangulated projects meet forming a self-referential "closed-circle triangle." Aubert desires himself.

               Here, one could split hairs, and say that perhaps Aubert doesn’t so much want to make love to his younger self but in fact wants to be young again. To that Supercuts hair technician I would suggest, along with the feminist psychoanalyst Young-Bruehl, that those two desires can never be completely teased from one another, that they constitute a hair that never fully splits, because sexual desire is often at least partially an expression of the desire to not only possess but “be” the loved object. St. Aubert, the philosopher of sentiment who exults in lived sensation, cannot fully inure himself to the prospect of diminished and finally extinguished sensation and so constructs interlocking identifications that allow him at least the phantastic prospect of reclaiming his youth. But this phantasy apparatus of identification and sublimation subsumes both Emily and Valancourt as proxies for himself. Seen in a certain way, there is no one left but St. Aubert. And that Udolpho’s gloss on desire as structural, triangulated, and always deferred through sublimation, points to modernity’s always incomplete complication and interpenetration of desire and identity. What is "uncanny" about Udolpho is not so much the horror we feel at doubting our faith in the predictability of the natural world, but the ways in which that world, no matter what our desires, continually returns us to the space of deferral that not only holds in tension the real and the unreal, but represents as two sides of the same coin the self and that which the self desires.   

Critical about Criticism: Arnold, Frye, White, and McKeon

     Ok, last night I finally finished Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). It took me more than a week, I admit, but I don’t think I have been altogether unproductive. During the same period I initiated a new practice (part of the “forest” initiative) where I read the introduction to a major critical-text every day or so, and immediately draft an annotated bibliography blurb on it. So while finishing the second half of Udolpho, I read and wrote on the introductions to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), and finally finished Matthew Arnold’s The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864-5) and Michael McKeon’s Origins of the English Novel: 1600-1740 (2002).

              

I had a quick, strong, cocaine-ish response to the critical works, given that they all speak to one another in a continuous, engaged, and contentious conversation with one another.

There is a readily discernible passing of the baton from Arnold to Frye, Frye to White, and White to McKeon. Matthew Arnold’s definition of criticism as the disinterested identification, investigation, and propagation of the best art, with the wider goal of maintaining the free flow of ideas (thus assuring the fertilization of still more great art) is all but echoed by Frye in Anatomy ninety years later. Frye’s real dissent from Arnold is, first, that Arnold doesn’t make good on his own call for ideological and political disinterestedness, given that Arnold’s criticism is ultimately aimed at producing a Christian moral-religious perfection and, second, Arnold’s tendency to think of art/literature as readily hierarchizable in terms of objective, artistic value. Again, Frye points to ethnocentric contradictions in Arnold’s critique of mere “parochial taste” as opposed to real criticism, positing that any hard and fast canonization of some art at the expense of others denotes, to use Arnold's own words against him, a “parochial” taste." Frye’s criticisms of Arnold, of course, grow out of of his own affectionate commitment to Arnold; he only criticizes Arnold in terms of Arnold’s own values, in a way re-fitting Arnold’s conception of criticism for the multi-culturalism of the next half century which will prove inhospitable to Arnold’s signature distinction between high and low culture. I like how Anatomy, best known as Frye’s pre-structural, formalist break with New Criticism, also serves as a bridge for Arnold’s conception of criticism over troubled modernist waters.       

               From there, Frye asserts that literature-art forms itself out of swirling currents of repeated structures and motifs, and that identifying these formations is the major part of criticism. For instance, Western literature repeatedly structures itself in terms of the three aspects of literature (the tragic, comic, and thematic) and five modes (mythic, low mimetic, high mimetic, and ironic). In Metahistory, White contends that Frye’s (and others) generic formalizations apply to and structure the production of history contending that history-production is a literary act and thus that history and historiography are susceptible to literary theory. McKeon, in Origins, takes this one step further, and demonstrates convincingly that history and literary art are historically produced discursive formations that, although now seem mutually exclusive, at one time, at a different point of empiricism’s ever evolving relationship with Western discourse, were practically indistinguishable. McKeon’s text seems to me as directly, if not admittedly, in conversation with White as Frye is with Arnold. White’s lexicon and theoretical tool box – the notions of “dialectic” etc – seem to recur in McKeon in one form or another, which is to say: the very theoretical tissue of both arguments is cut from the same cloth. 

The July Progress Report: Dire.

               My productivity having taken a hit from New York Gay Pride, I just now getting back into a groove, studying on three separate tracks. First, I am reading the entirety of Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, about fifty pages a day. Second, I am reading a leisurely chapter-or-three/day of Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which has proved surprisingly pleasurable considering how long-winded it is. And, third, I am playing catch-up, writing blurbish summaries of the essays comprising The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader.

               My plan the past few days was to start studying in a way similar to that of BarBri students preparing for the Bar Exam, alternating studying at both the macro- and micro- registers. So, I would attack the “forest” by setting up an expansive outline for myself that covers pretty much all of the material I have on my lists (probably relying on a Norton and a History of English Lit I have lying around), so as to give me a sense of the connections, limits, continuities, and textures that will make up my exam as a whole. And then work on the individual “trees” by continuing my relatively close reading of Radcliffe and McKeon, filling in the former with my notes on the latter as I deem appropriate. This alternating between the forest and its trees, would continually contextualize whatever close reads I am doing, close reads that I might otherwise lose without an overarching structure to organize them. It’s easier to learn about Wordsworth when you read him already knowing (basically) how he relates to Coleridge, Romanticism etc.    In fact, it might be easier to learn about Wordsworth if I get myself a clear understanding of what Romanticism is beforehand. Much to my private embarrassment, studying the late Eighteenth century and early Nineteenth century English literature all on my own is seriously exposing the ignorances consequent of my rigidly Victorian literary predilections. Unfortunately, time and energy constraints (laziness?) have prevented my initiating the macro-level of my studying. Maybe I need to put down one of the three texts I am currently juggling to make that happen?  

The First Chapter of Anne Radcliffe's THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO (1794), Genre, and Eco-Criticism

In the incredibly informative introduction to the World’s Classics Edition of Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Bonamy Dobree cites the novel's popularity as a product of its blending of three major genres, that of horror, sentiment, and picturesque. And Bonamy isn’t kidding; the first chapter of Radcliffe’s novel is all about the Aubert family’s sensitivity to each other and their remote natural surroundings. Aubert listens to the music of the nightingale, takes in the scents of the fresh water and plant life, and basks in the Burkean sublimity of the vast Pyrenees mountains. Emily starts crying over a sunrise. It's exhausting to read, really. I prefer my sentiment a little more dead, thank you. 

Of course, Udolpho is best known as the high water mark of Gothic literature. But after reading just the first chapter, the other generic activity Bonamy points out are just as strongly felt. And the specific mix of sentiment and nature loving, I think, results in something akin to a proto-eco-critical stance. Take, for instance, how St. Aubert reacts (sentimentally, of course) when his worldly, materialistic brother-in-law (and obvious foil), M. Quesnel, wants to do some gardening on Aubert’s ancestral property back home . . .     

'The ground about the chateau is encumbered with trees; I mean to cut some of them down.' 'Cut down the trees too!' said St. Aubert. 'Certainly.  Why should I not? they interrupt my prospects.  There is
a chesnut which spreads its branches before the whole south side of
the chateau, and which is so ancient that they tell me the hollow of
its trunk will hold a dozen men.  Your enthusiasm will scarcely
contend that there can be either use, or beauty, in such a sapless
old tree as this.' 'Good God!' exclaimed St. Aubert, 'you surely will not destroy that
noble chesnut, which has flourished for centuries, the glory of the
estate!  It was in its maturity when the present mansion was built.
How often, in my youth, have I climbed among its broad branches, and
sat embowered amidst a world of leaves, while the heavy shower has
pattered above, and not a rain drop reached me!  How often I have sat
with a book in my hand, sometimes reading, and sometimes looking out
between the branches upon the wide landscape, and the setting sun,
till twilight came, and brought the birds home to their little nests
among the leaves!  How often--but pardon me,' added St. Aubert,
recollecting that he was speaking to a man who could neither
comprehend, nor allow his feelings, 'I am talking of times and
feelings as old-fashioned as the taste that would spare that
venerable tree.'

The tree as “venerable” is laced with human virtue and St. Aubert is struck with sympathy or “feeling” for its pain and fate. Human consciousness and the natural world, in terms of Radcliffe’s idea of sentiment, are co-penetrative, which sounds a lot like eco-criticism, right? Whatever the case, Quesnel's reasoning that the venerable trees Aubert is so hot for "interrupt . . . [his] . . . prospects", denotes a proto-Marxist impulse to commodify the natural world that stands in opposition to Aubert's proto-eco-critical sentimento-preservationism. (#portmanteaucrazy)   

Anthony Trollope was HEAVILY Influenced by William Thackery, and I Can't Blame Him.

Super, R.H. Trollope’s “Vanity Fair.” The Journal of Narrative Technique. 9:1 (Winter, 1979): 1-20.

            In this mini-essay, “Super!” delineates the strong influence of William M. Thackery on Anthony Trollope. Super marks concisely the historico-textual intersection of Thackery and Trollope at the 1847 publication of Thackery’s Vanity Fair and Trollope’s completing his first novel and beginning his next, The Warden, immediately after. From the writing of The Warden on, Super says, Trollope is indelibly marked with Thackery-envy, becoming from that point a “Thackeryan novelist.”

I am interested in the notion that Thackery is not merely a historical influence on Trollope, one safely separated from Trollope by a generation or two. Thackery and Trollope were practically contemporaries.

Also interesting: the influences of Thackery evident in Trollope, the continuities that run between the two authors, are by no means an august tradition. The ideas, motifs, and textual engagements Trollope makes with Thackery are registered as shared artistic defects by the (roughly current) critics. What did this awful influence look like? I made a list.

(1)    Trollope takes up Thackerey’s idea of Vanity Fair as a “A Novel without a Hero” in Claverings.

(2)   Trollope’s novels, like Thackerey’s, all take place in a shared fictional universe, so that characters from one novel can show up or be mentioned in another.

a.       Vanity Fair’s Colonel Dobbin shows up as a guest of Colonel Newcome in The Newcomes, for instance. 

b.       The Saturday Review hated on this extended-universe-shit, saying that it was a sure fire way to bore readers. “If the present fashion continues, and the heroes of one novel reappear so constantly in the next, readers will begin to hope that funerals, and not marriages, may in future be made the finale in which all romances terminate.” (13)

c.       The Saturday Review, of course, is wrong; the surprise recognition of a known character from an earlier novel unexpectedly appearing in a later novel produces an excitement of recognition in the reader that is particularly pleasurable. It rewards close reading. And this pleasure doubles on itself with a kind of uncanniness, when the reader realizes that the novel they have in their hands, which they thought was a something completely new and alien, is in effect connected to and at one with a previously known world that turned out to be bigger and more complex than they imagined. Finding and mapping these connections, re-familiarizing oneself with the bigger and more intricate dimensions of the fictional universe they only thought they knew is a higher level of textual pleasure I usually only associate with sci-fi and comic book genres.

(3)     Thackerey and Trollope both integrated real life locations and businesses in their novels, as well as some of the “too-ridiculous-to-be-made up” names of real life people and personalities. 

(4)   Thackery and Trollope both parody giants of literature.

a.       Vanity Fair ch. vi: Thackery satirizes contemporary novelists.

b.      The Warden: Trollope parodies Carlyle and Dickens as “Dr. Pessimist Anticant” and “Mr. Popular Sentiment.”

(5)   Extending the concept of the “integrated universe” from (2), Trollope would include names from Thackery works in his novels.

a.       Thackery uses a pseudonym of his friend Matthew James Higgins, “Jacob Omnium,” for a character in Vanity Fair ch. xxii, which Trollope, in turn, picks up for the name of a Duke (Duke of Omnium).

                                                                          i.      In this case, the real life integration is passed on from Thackery to Trollope via Trollope’s textual integration. WHOA!

This is all not to say that Trollope is a completely passive in his reception of Thackereyan influence. Super points out that, although Trollope originally based his Lady Eustace on Thackery’s Becky Sharpe, he later rejects their similarity, almost ex post facto, claiming that Eustace would have been designed as she was had he never read of Sharpe. In a Bloomian fashion, here, Trollope receives Thackeryean influence, creates with it, and then rejects it so as to claim his production, Lady Eustace, as more fully his own, thereby overcoming and dominating the source of his own artistic power. Interestingly, Super endorses and ratifies Trollope’s Bloomian revolt on Thackery, judging that although Trollope was considered by his contemporaries as a “slightly inferior version of Thackery” that, in fact, Trollope’s Eustace was a superior – “more human” – construction than Thackery’s Sharpe. 

Trollope's "It Is What It Is" View of Capitalism in THE WAY WE LIVE NOW.

“When Melmotte’s affairs were ultimately wound up there was found to be nearly enough property to satisfy all his proved liabilities. Very many men started up with huge claims, asserting that they had been robbed, and in the confusion it was hard to ascertain who had been robbed, or who had simply been unsuccessful in their attempts to rob others.”

Trollope’s satire here is well taken. In a speculation filled, litigious capitalist society, the righting of large scale unjust enrichment is the occasion for a greater number of smaller unjust enrichments making economic justice an ever receding horizon.

  When Mr. Brehgert, the honest Jew, gets his investment capital back out of the Melmotte debacle, he hands his money over to a lawyer so as to better manage and protect the fortune his too trusting business sense almost lost. 

 “I shall just make Squercum [an unscrupulous but skilled lawyer] allow me so much a month, and I shall have all the bills and that kind of thing sent to him, and he will do everything, and pull me up if I’m getting wrong. I like Squercum.”
            “Won’t he rob you, old fellow?” suggested Nidderdale.            “Of course he will; - but he won’t let any one else do it. One has to be plucked, but it’s everything to have it done on a system. If he’ll only let me have ten shillings out of every sovereign I think I can get along.” (760)

            This exchange sounds like an especially trenchant “investment joke” conveying the endemic and systematic, but ultimately workable corruption of the new capitalist world order. Berghert can only protect his money from crooks by hiring one to steal from him. Those who recognize how much they have to gain by allowing a minimum of illegality – even when it cuts into their profits – are the ones who will thrive in the new world order. What I like about this scene is that it refuses the notion that Melmotte’s scam-capitalism is somehow expunged from the world of the novel once his Ponzi scheme fails. Melmotte is not the criminal economic aberration that, once excluded, restores the otherwise smooth running and just system of exchange. Quite the contrary, Melmotte’s dishonest speculation, his preying on the investors that trust him, is still the natural order of the novel’s economic universe if to a smaller, more manageable degree. Melmotte may be dead, but Brehgert and Nidderdale are still living in a world made in Melmotte’s image. Trollope isn’t jazzed about this new world order. But he seems to recognize that it is one in which we can live happily once, like Brehgert, we learn the rules; thus, Trollope accepts capitalism with a sighing eye roll.    

I attempt to read Dickens' The Pickwick Papers (1836), this is what happens.

As you might have noticed, I have yet to post anything on anything read recently towards my major historical field, The Long Nineteenth Century of Britain. This is because I am currently reading The Pickwick Papers (1836) on audio book, and I hate Dickens.

As a Victorianist, this is a hard thing for me to say, or – rather – it is a career threatening thing to say, given C.D. is so major to the field. However, I think the reasons I don’t like reading his work, especially the early Dickens, has a lot to do with why he is so important. For one, as Raymond Williams observes in The Country and The City, Dickens is one of the first to capture the city as a heterogeneous whole; Dickens effectively communicates the city as a sense-deluge of different voices, textures, sounds, and lights that somehow hang together as one thing. I find the orchestra of different voices confusing and miasmic as a whole, and when I focus on any one – like I did reading Oliver Twist – I find them limp, stereotypical, and un-compelling. Though The Pickwick Papers is less urban than, say, Oliver Twist or A Tale of Two Cities (duh), it takes place in small towns, manor houses, and farms as much as in London proper, the plotless-ness of the serial-made-into-Dickens’-first-novel is dizzying to read and impossible for me to invest in. It’s value, however, as an artifact of the history of the novel (also perhaps the graphic novel), and – as Eve Sofosky Sedgwick points out – a key example of a pre-Gothic homosocial milieu unmolested by homophobia – I begrudgingly accept.

            Dickens was twenty four when he got the commission to write the The Pickwick Papers. He was still writing under the pen name, Boz, and had hitherto written slice-of-life-in-London-pieces. The commission that would become Pickwick was to write copy for sporting illustrations by illustrator Robert Seymour, to create what was then called “a picture novel.” Long story short: Dickens flipped the switch on Seymour, took over the book and wrote whatever he wanted, regardless of what was going on in Seymour’s illustrations. The sportsmen of the pictures, in Dickens’ text, became a society of pseudo-intellectuals who follow the teachings/meanderings of their most pre-eminent member, Samuel Pickwick. The picaresque style adventures of the fraternity of buffoonish eccentrics, an effective lampooning of bourgeiose masculinity, caught on with readers; Dickens’ character, Sam Weller, especially, became something of a publishing sensation. Seymour killed himself, and other illustrators were hired, much like in contemporary comic book publishing (not using “The Marvel Method”), to illustrate Dickens’ story.

            The Pickwick Papers is all about an anxiety, or mild discomfort with male homosociality. It is very much a whimsical double of the very dark, very serious Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), whose plot is really about the corruptive – sexual, moral, physical, and chemical - potential of professional males bonding with one another rather than wives and children. Other than the tone – the two novels differ in class focus, Stevenson’s novel seems to be about working, professional men (doctors and lawyers) while the members of the Pickwick club seem more or less highborn. The attitude toward homosociality in the two novels differs as well. In Dr. Jekyll the male characters are seemingly innervated by a secret relationship that, although never stated or expressed, manifests in the degeneration of their clique of professional males. In Pickwick, the homosocial bonds are very much above board, only border line erotic, and – as Sedgwick notes – don’t incite any homophobic panic. Instead of physical and psychological break down, the homosociality results in a lot of slapstick buffoonery.  

Reflections on . . . the first half of Edmund Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE (1789)

I have been focusing on my QUEER THEORY minor field, reading ALL OF Abelove, Barale, and Halperin's "The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader," I fear to the detriment of my LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY BRIT LIT major field. Uh oh! Comp field guilt!

So, in an effort to gradually become more systematic in my comps studying, I went and took the VERY FIRST text on my major field list, Edmund Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE (1789) out of the library. Burke's text is as meandering and repetitiive as it is important; from what I remember of my "Marriage and Nation in 19th Century Britain" class, his Conservativism, primarily his ideas about inheritance, bubble up in some "great estate" books like Persuasion. So, here are some passages I am find illuminating, that is to say "quotable-for-the-purposes-of-orals" . . .

1. Burke doesn't like the idea of a people's natural right to form their own government. Consequently, sorry Jean Valjean, "revolution bad." Unless of course, its the revolution that established the government Burke is writing under, then its a completely different story. To wit . . .

The principles of the Revolution of 1688 . . . are . . . found . . . in the statute called the Declaration of Right. In that most wise, sober, and considerate declaration . . . not one word is said, nor one suggestion made, of a general right "to choose our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct; and to form a government for ourselves. (163) 

2.  Revolution should only happen when absolutely necessary in maintaining the succession of the already existing crown and existing order because, Burke says, the rights of the individual subject are bound up with the constancy of that order.

This Declaration of Right (The Act of the 1st William and Mary) is the corner-stone of our constitution . . . It is called "an act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the crown." You will observe, that these rights and this succession are declared in one body, and bound indissolubly together. (163) 

And, in a way, his logic holds: if the social body has a right to determine their government, a new government that is, at will, then the rights of subjects protected by that government are also being overturned or put in danger.  

3. Also, when change or revolution does occur, it should be circumscribed. Individuals in power can change, but the offices they hold and they structures they fill, should remain constant. The system needs to be preserved.

Though a king may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy. By as strong, or by a stronger reason, the house of commons cannot renounce its share of authority. The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender. The constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other, and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements. (169) 

It is far from impossible to reconcile . . . the use both of a fixed rule and an occasional deviation; the sacredness of an hereditary principle of a succession in our government, with a power of change in its application in cases of extreme emergency . . . the change is to be confined to the peccant part only; to the part which produced the necessary deviation. (169) 

4. The idea of succession, it turns out, is a trope of inheritance. As such, the king's right to his crown guaranteeing continuity of station is cut from the same cloth as a first born son's right of primogeniture to father's land. This leads to an interesting supporting argument as to the law . . .

On this principle the succession of the crown has always been what it now is, an hereditary succession by law: in the old line it was a succession by common law; in the new by statute law operating on the principles of common law, not changing the substance, but regulating the mode, and describing the persons. (169) 

For Burke, succession is inheritance, inheritance is law, and law operates on a strict rule of stare decisis.

5. But not everything is so elegantly parallel and continuous. The rule of the law, for instance, stops short of the crown.

Kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly the servants of the people, because their power has no other rational end than that of the general advantage; but it is not true that they are, in the ordinary sense . . . any thing like servants . . . The Great kind obeys no other person. (179) 

6. For Burke, the "natural" right to representation in government the Revolutionists are pumping is specular and opportunistic, a made up idea that operates as a pre-text for those "heated with their particular religious theories" to vindicate those theories with bloodshed and disorder. (216) Burke is a skeptic who believes Revolution asserts a social order no more legitimate than the one existing presently and, indeed, less legitimate because the one existing presently . . . you know . . . exists presently.

Far am I from denying in theory . . . the real rights of men . . . Men have a right to live by . . . [the beneficent rule of]; they have a right to justice . . . They have a right to the fruits of their industry . . . They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents . . . But as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual out to have in the management of the state, that I must deny  to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society . . . It is a thing settled by convention. [my italics] (218)

7. Inheritance, succession, convention, constitution . . . These are the watch words for Burke.

8. Interesting note: I am reading an edition that is all-foot-noted and stuff . . . And, apparently, Burke's sense of constitution was a lot more holistic and organic than an American like myself, who thinks of a "constitution" as a program-like document for a system of government, would assume. Instead, Burke has an almost Bourdieu-ish sense of the word; it includes all the offices and practices and conventions of a state, really how things operate, as opposed to any discrete document. Though, as his example of the Declaration of Right would attest, Burke's working definition of a constitution doesn't preclude such a document. For Burke, the document is more a distillation or a re-application of the constitution, than the constitution itself.

Queer! The Abiding Influence of Gayle Rubin's THINKING SEX (1984)

Gayle Rubin's "Thinking Sex" is the opening essay of Abelove and company's Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. And with good reason: it's crucial and multiply canonized. I must have had to read it twice before, once in "Gay and Lesbians Studies class" as an undergrad and at least one more time in law school in "Feminist Legal Theory." Re-reading it for studying for comps, it's forthrightness about the political  dimension of the sex act (not just identities) and prescient critique of the ways we continue to arbitrarily value some sex acts above others is really surprising. 

          Rubin performs a quick historical gloss to illustrate the ways sex acts are politicized, and hierarchized, her battle cry: “It is time to recognize the political dimensions of erotic life” (35) and her thesis: “a radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression.” (9) Sexual oppression is constituted and enabled by sex negativity, sexual essentialism, and the misplaced scale of sex acts where “small differences in value or behavior are often experienced as cosmic threats.” (11) The idea of misplaced scale, for Rubin, explains why in some jurisdictions, at the time of her writing (1984), consensual sodomy still carried twenty year prison sentences. This concatenation of ideological forces, Rubin famously offers, creates an arbitrary hierarchy of sex acts where married, reproductive, monogamous heterosexual sex, from the top, looks down upon homosexual, promiscuous, commercial and S&M sex.  She provides two classic graphic images to illustrate this concept: first, the "moving line" that demarcates good from less good to bad sex and, second, "the charmed circle." 

And . . . 

Just kidding! Gayle Rubin didn't create CHARMED, silly!!! She's important; but not THAT important! Ok . . . 

Ok, I'm still fucking with you. That's not it either. Here we go . . . 

Ok, that's really it. Honest. Anyways . . . 

The weakness of Rubin’s formulation, on her own and De Lauretis’ view, is that it sunders sex acts from gender identity, thus acting coy as to the identity politics that informs the hierarchization of sex acts. For instance, male homosexuality and female homosexuality are almost never legally sanctioned equally. In the modern era, sodomy between males got tougher criminal sentences than females, in the Middle Ages, vice versa. The disparity in legal response to the same sex acts performed by different kinds of subjects suggests that sex acts are not themselves politicized without reference to the social positions that perform them. Rubin anticipated this critique and responds to it in a footnote. In her defense, perhaps her article is so important precisely because it attempts to look at acts independent of identity, even if that separation potentially results in paradox i.e. an “act of homosexual sodomy,” in our regime of sexuality, references a “homosexual identity”     

Rubin, from what I remember, is struggling against Second Wave Feminists (especially my favorite snitty-kitty, Catharine Mackinnon) and Conservative social forces, which she counter-intuitively but perspicaciously links in their sex negative ideologies. This said, I can't help but think that Rubin's focus on acts as opposed to identities creates a wider lens with which to see the politics of sex. Not limited to focusing on "suspect classes," Rubin's theoretical focus can hone in on all the arbitrary politicizations of sex that plague not only minorities but white, heterosexual monogamists, like video-ed sex. 

Her other, more explicit theoretical moves? Rubin confronts sexual essentialism with Foucaudian constructionism (History of Sexuality Vol. 1, though not included in the anthology, citationally asserts its centrality to the field on page 10). But Rubin has to square her personal bogey man, “sex negativity” with Foucault’s potentially contradictory “repressive hypothesis.” Rubin says there isn’t a contradiction at all. “Because of his emphasis on the ways sexuality is produced,” she remarks, “Foucault has been vulnerable to interpretations that deny or minimize the reality of sexual repression . . . Foucault makes it abundantly clear that he is not denying the existence of sexual repression so much as inscribing it within a larger dynamic.” (10) And, having read a lot of Foucault interviews, I am inclined to agree with her.

It’s worth noting that misappropriations of Foucault are a genre of theory in and of itself. In Medieval studies, in Getting Medieval, Carolyn Dinshaw repeatedly repeals over-simplified, hyper-specified, rigidifications of Foucault’s ideas, namely, the Foucaudian New Historicist’s insistence that the human subject, and all its psychological depth, is historically specific to the Modern Era, and that humans before that time didn’t, you know, identify as people or think of themselves as individuals or something. In point of fact, though his rhetoric in the Archeology of Knowledge is a little  . . . melodramatic, Foucault doesn’t quite maintain so rigid a claim.

But – to return to Rubin – reading this foundational, career defining article in 2013, I couldn’t help but marvel how prescient it is about our society's abiding arbitrary moralism in regards to sex acts as demonstrated by our culture’s obsession with “sex tapes.” Indeed, twenty nine years ago, Rubin identified sex involving communications technology as arbitrarily oppressed. On page 7 of the anthology, she bemoans overzealous child pornography laws that would imprison someone caught with “a nude snapshot of a 17-year-old lover.” And then, through a chain of association with better known sex oppressions, cites the taboo surrounded video-ed sex as a form of discrimination: “Whether sex acts are gay or straight, coupled or in groups, naked or in underwear, commercial or free, with or without video, should not be ethical concerns.” It was reading that that I realized how influential and foundational Rubin’s essay is for me personally; it both conceptually and, apparently specifically, provides the framework for my own thoughts on the intersection of communications technology and sex as I expressed them here last year. Reading it over, some of the ideas and phrases, the attention to the arbitrariness of the sex taboo, seem unquestionably Rubin. 

Money and Marriage in Anthony Trollope's THE WAY WE LIVE NOW (1875)

     I'm such a go-getter; I actually started reading-and-writing for my comprehensive exam this winter. Over Christmas break I read The Moonstone (1868), whose plot completely escaped me, I might as well have not read it, and The Way We Live Now (1875), which has made me quite the smitten-kitten for fellow "Anthony," Anthony Trollope. I even wrote some stuff! But first, here is a photo of Anthony Trollope. 

Look at that bushy daddy! Anyway, here are some of my first impressions of The Way We Live Now. 

Comprehensive Exams Aren't Just About READING Your Lists . . .

This picture is kind of emblematic of what my summer should be . . .

(1) The arginine enhanced "gym crack." (2) The super-hero fan boy realness of the Comic-Con pass. (3) The double fisting of Victorian lit with (4) the menu to a health food restaurant used as a book mark . . . Look at all my lazer thin, kiddy pool deep levels . . .

Anyways, this December, pursuant to his Doctorate in English Literature, yours truly will be sitting for a comprehensive oral exam in which he will be tasked with convincing four of his professors that he is an *EXPERT* in the major historical field of "Nineteenth Century British Literature," and two minor fields, the "Novel as Genre" and "Queer Theory."

The lists of texts on which I will be tested are all but set. Now I just need to get to reading them, and proceed to produce brilliant, insightful connections amidst their pages that my memory will preserve through the day of the exam at which time I will deluge my teachers and mentors with sparkling, electric insight thus rendering unassailable my sassy genius. Or, at the very least, inspire a "pity pass."

Reading alone doesn't cut it, however. According to this study skills sage, writing daily is a crucial element of a comprehensive exam study plan. And Leonard Casuto seems to warn that the exam itself is something of a short-term goal and institutional hoop the studying for which should be aimed at contributing to more long-term, substantive goals, namely, developing my dissertation. The Chair of my Exam Committee (one of the four), Eva, agrees with him. All in all, the reading of my exam lists should be an active, synthetic, productive, goal oriented affair, and I figure what better way to do that then to set up a publicly visible, informal-in-tone blog on which I can send ideas up a cybernetic flag pole and see if any avatar hands salute.

Right now, I am reading, as an audio book, one of my personal least favorite authors, Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers), Abelove's Gay and Lesbian Studies Reader, and I have yet to choose a third something or other for "the novel."