Monday, September 15, 2008

George Eliot, Adam Bede and pregnant reflections on vital continuity in art

George Eliot is at the "centre," F. R. Leavis tells me, in a Foreword included in the Signet Classics edition of Adam Bede, "of the creative achievement of the English language," and she "incites to pregnant reflections on vital continuity in art." What can this mean? Leavis wants to put Eliot in the middle of a literary tradition - Scott, Hawthorne, Eliot, James, Hardy, Lawrence. One leads to the next.

I had never read any Eliot before taking on Adam Bede this summer. That list reminds me why. I had already picked up Leavis's idea from somewhere. Right, Hardy (ugh) and Lawrence (ugh, ugh)*. George Eliot was a proponent of Big Ideas, writing philosophical essays disguised as novels. Like Dostoevsky, or (shudder) Thomas Mann.

Up against this tradition, I set Gustave Flaubert and his aesthete descendants, as does Leavis, interestingly enough. Madame Bovary was published three years before Adam Bede, Eliot's first novel, so she had no excuse for not writing a perfectly polished, elegant, and possibly hollow novel. Flaubert had shown the way. Come on, George Eliot, if that is your real name, get with the new thing.

I express these opinions in imperfect ignorance, so no need to seriously argue with me - "you don't know what you're talking about" is sufficient to defeat me.

Prof. Novel Reading was able to cajole the critbloggers at The Valve into hosting a long reading of Adam Bede this summer. Although I was unable to play along much, I owe them credit for, at the least, encouraging me to read the darn thing. This week, a few notes about what I found. No, it's not Flaubert, and why would I want it to be.

* No objections, enthusiasm, even, for Hardy's poetry and a number of Lawrence's short stories.

13 comments:

  1. I'm not so fond of Lawrence's novels, but I have a book of his literary criticism, which I'm thinking I might enjoy.

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  2. I like some of Lawrence's poetry, actually, and am rather fond of (what I can remember of) "Women in Love" and the banned one. I had to reread two Austens and try a "sensational" Mary E Braddon novel before I could return to Eliot. "Adam Bede" was dreadfully pious. However, I am finding "Mill on the Floss" much more fun. Not a cloying paragon of virtue in sight!

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  3. I listened to Middlemarch and enjoyed it, otherwise I have no experience with Eliot. Will be curious to see your thoughts as you read Adam Bede. I love Madame Bovary and didn't realize the two novels were contemporaries...yes, that would make for necessary comparison. But I can't help feel sorry for Eliot, seems nearly unfair. Flaubert is just that good.

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  4. I'd be more likely to pick up Lawrence's criticism, (or poems, or short stories) myself, than another of his novels. Maybe someday.

    Imani - you've already moved on to "The Mill on the Floss"? A strong vote in Eliot's favor!

    The years around Adam Bede are a very rich period for the novel - young Tolstoy and mature Turgenev, Trollope's Barchester novels, Melville's late fantasies, Dickens at the peak of his powers, Madame Bovary and Les Miserables. Eliot had some tough competition.

    That Middlemarch you heard didn't involve Judi Dench, did it? That seems like cheating, somehow.

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  5. Yes, although there *is* a nostalgic factor. It was one of the first classics I tried on my own (at around 12) and it stayed with me up 'till now even though I was quite sure I never finished it. I've always been meaning to find out what made it so impressive to a 12 year old.

    (I tried "Nicholas Nickelby" around the same time but I managed to finish that one, eventually. I found Dicken's style easier to take to as a teenager.)

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  6. I find Dickens' style easier to take as an adult. But I hope to get to The Mill and the Floss soon. Soonish.

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  7. No Judi Dench that I remember...I think it was a man narrating.

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  8. Prof. Maitzen recommended a BBC version of Middlemarch which is suffused with Judi Dench narration. Didn't seem quite fair to other books, or movies.

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  9. Well - Lawrence is now so completely out of fashion you'd be hard pushed to find any of his books in a Waterstones. But I will argue that he was - flawed and infuriating as he is - a great writer. And a really unexpected one, from his background. The test is that you can take his worst books - The Plumed Serpent, for example - and still find not just phrases, sentences, or passages, but pages and pages of wonderful writing.

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  10. Neil, you made me look. The Rainbow was just as I remembered, a nightmare. "They were separate people with separate destinies. Why should they seek each to lay violent hands of claim on the other?" Indeed, why? Yuck.

    On the other hand, "The Rocking-Horse Winner," now that's a piece of work. Much more my kind of thing, at least. I note that it was written 20 years after The Rainbow. A different writer.

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  11. When Lawrence sent the manuscript of his first novel, The White Peacock, to Ford Madox Ford, he received the judgment, "It's got every fault that the English novel can have." But Ford (or rather Hueffer, as he then was), also recognised, "you've got GENIUS." Lawrence's work is profoundly flawed, but that doesn't stop him being a major writer, and one who balances his crude attitudinising with subtle observation. The Rocking-Horse Winner is the best of the short stories, but there are other very strong ones. Many of his poems fail, but there is a good book's-worth of first-rate ones. As a prose writer he can be ludicrously overblown and clumsy, but equally he can be sinewy and deft. One stylistic quirk of his prose is his trick of repeating words and phrases within a sentence or a paragraph, something it's very hard to do successfully. It's a link, I think, to oral storytelling. Here's a paragraph of the Lawrence I admire, describing a school of porpoises in his unfinished novel The Flying Fish. In regard to the oral qualities of Lawrence's prose, it's interesting that this was dictated from his sickbed in 1925, after he nearly died of malaria, rather than written. I count eleven appearances of speed, speeding, sped in this one paragraph, four in a single sentence. But it works:

    It was a spectacle of the purest and most perfected joy in life that Gethin Day ever saw. The porpoises were ten or a dozen, round-bodied torpedo fish, and they stayed there as if they were not moving, always there, with no motion apparent, under the purely pellucid water, yet speeding on at just the speed of the ship, without the faintest show of movement, yet speeding on in the most miraculous precision of speed. It seemed as if the tail-flukes of the last fish exactly touched the ship's bows, under-water, with the frailest, yet precise and permanent touch. It seemed as if nothing moved, yet fish and ship swept on through the tropical ocean. And the fish moved, they changed places all the time. They moved in a little cloud, and with the most wonderful sport they were above, they were below, they were to the fore, yet all the time the same one speed, the same one speed, and the last fish just touching with his tail-flukes, the iron cut-water of the ship. Some would be down in the blue, shadowy, but horizontally motionless in the same speed. Then with a strange revolution, these would be up in pale green water, and others would be down. Even the toucher, who touched the ship, would in a twinkling be changed. And ever, ever the same pure horizontal speed, sometimes a dark back skimming the water's surface light, from beneath, but never the surface broken. And ever the last fish touching the ship, and ever the others speeding in motionless, effortless speed, and intertwining with strange silkiness as they sped, intertwining among one another, fading down to the dark blue shadow, and strangely emerging again among the silent, swift others, in pale green water. All the time, so swift, they seemed to be laughing.

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  12. Neil, thanks for that passage - especially if you typed it in! I couldn't find anything in The Rainbow that I enjoyed a fraction as much.

    I don't hold the failures of writers against them, much. I want to know what they did right.

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  13. I've added The Rocking Horse to my list, thanks. Having read Tess in high school, I was shocked to find myself laughing heartily outloud on a plane while reading Far from the Madding Crowd. Hardy can be funny, and knowledge of Hardy helps with Monty Python sketches.

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