Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Edith Wharton's semiotics - they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs…  (Ch. 6)

This line is not from an essay on semiotics, but from The Age of Innocence (1920), so in a sense, yes, from an essay on semiotics, but ahead of its time is what I am saying.

Newland Archer is the smartest and most sophisticated member of the tiny social elite of New York circa 187-, but that does not stop him from getting into a little bit of trouble with an interesting and exotic woman.  It almost stops him, and the behind-the-scenes scheming of that society, his family and fiancée and a number of others, including the interesting woman, does stop him.

This is a classic 20th century story, used in many novels.  The smart guy is not as smart as he thinks he is, and the dumb people around him are not as dumb as he thinks they are.  The point of view stays very close to Newland, allowing me to share and enjoy his surprise and defeats.

This is all a representation of Wharton’s world, but she would have been in her teens at the time.

Newland’s sophistication is shown, again and again, by his interest in poetry.  There is quite a lot of signification of taste in The Age of Innocence.  Just a few lines after the “hieroglyphic” quotation, Wharton shows us Newland training his fiancée in the proper understanding of Tennyson:

(She was advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King, but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.)

This is how Wharton undermines sympathy in Newland, with whom I, the reader, am stuck.  His taste is perfect, correct, but geez.  “His boyhood had been saturated with Ruskin, and he had read all the latest books” (Ch. 9).  Or how about this, an unboxing video, without the video: “That evening he unpacked his books from London,” finding Herbert Spencer, Alphonse Daudet, “and a novel called ‘Middlemarch,’ as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews” (Ch. 15).

One of the novellas, thankfully only one (“False Dawn”), in Old New York (1924) is entirely about the arbitrary signifiers of taste.  A young American does his Grand Tour with a big budget for paintings, but he has the misfortune of encountering, in Switzerland, the young John Ruskin, who corrupts his tastes and leads him to blow his money on obscure antique painters like Giotto and Fra Angelico rather than Guido Reni and Salvator Rosa, which poisons his relationship with his father – poisons his father – “it was the affair of the pictures that had killed him” (Ch. 7) – and eventually his life.

The giant, crashing irony is that although it would not be so bad to own (and sell) a Rosa, Ruskin and his pre-Raphaelite pals had led the young sap to the “right” paintings, worth a fortune in 1924 (and still today).  This irony is rubbed in on the last page, but you, educated and sophisticated in art history, will have gotten it long before that.

I do not know if “False Dawn” Is good, exactly, but it was fascinating to see Wharton deal with Ruskin and the arbitrary signifiers so directly.  It was clearly on her mind for some reason.

7 comments:

  1. "an unboxing video, without the video" I got a kick out of that. :D

    Newland sounds slightly irritating... hopefully not too much so. I think of Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise, who was annoying, but at least had one or two "aha!" moments where he gained maturity. I will still look forward to reading this, because I love character-driven stories.

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  2. Who watches those? Seriously, who watches those things.

    Not too annoying, exactly, the perfect balance. Just enough edge on him to keep a reader alert.

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  3. I remember The Age of Innocence having a fair amount to do with exploring ideas about love and conformity, the pursuit of happiness and the confinement of marriage. It's interesting that in this Ruskin novella of hers, it's art and convention that get taken to task by Wharton from what it sounds. "Arbitrary signifiers," hmm...

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  4. Right, a warning to the conformists of high society - this all seems so stable, but in fact it changes, slowly, and sometimes quickly. Standards of taste can really jerk you around. Ruskin was right, until he is no longer right.

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  5. Newland is terribly patronising in his interactions with May.

    Alphonse Daudet, really? Wharton shows how long she's lived in Paris. Was Alphonse Daudet really known outside of France? I'm not sure.

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  6. Every author mentioned is a code, isn't it? I guess Newland is a real Francophile, too.

    Newland is somewhat terrible. May's triumph - she's not as dumb as Newland thinks! - is probably my favorite part of the story.

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    1. May belongs to that kind of women who live in a society that assumes that they are stupid. But they manage to do what they want by manipulating the men around them into thinking that they made the decision when all they did was follow their wives nudges.

      I think that Newland is a bit "mou" (I don't know the exact word for this in English) but he has the merit to know his limits, to respect them and respect others around him by doing just that.

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