You have learnt to talk nonsense seriously - deconstructing The Moonstone

If you agree, as is only sensible, because it is true, that the best parts – best written, the most alive – of The Moonstone are the sections narrated by Gabriel Betteredge and Miss Clack, and that the best sections of The Woman in White are those narrated by “Count Fosco and the paralytic uncle,” in other words that the best parts of the novels are those narrated by oddballs with strong voices rather than those parts narrated by conventional figures of the ordinary fiction of their time, the dreary, dullish heroes and heroines who would be just as much at home in a thousand other forgotten novels, then you might ask why an author like Collins would not want to write a novel which is narrated only by the lively strong-voiced weirdos.  That is such a good question!  I was wondering the same thing.

Now, in The Moonstone, Betteredge and Clack between them fill well over half of the book, which is a lot.  Add in the short sections contributed by lawyers and policemen and so on, information-packed plot advancers that may be dull to provide a supposedly “realistic” foil for the wackier characters, and then also add in the late section narrated by Ezra Jennings, which I fear is a failed attempt at a more interesting voice, and most of The Moonstone is covered.  It is only a hundred page stretch by the hero, Franklin Blake, that is nothing special but maybe could be.

Blake’s section, to be clear, is interesting.  The Moonstone is a mystery novel; the sections advances and deepens the mystery.  But it is not a distinguished piece of prose writing.  It’s all right.

Remember that Franklin Blake is the character who has commissioned and organized the narratives that make up the book, not the novel but the non-fiction book.  Why does he do this?  As Rohan Maitzen asks her students:

Also, how far can we trust the story we think we know by the end, given the doubts Collins’s narrative technique has so effectively raised about first-person testimony?  Do his multiple narrators cumulatively overcome the presumption of unreliability?

Blake was a prime suspect in the theft of the diamond, a suspect for good reason.  By the end of the narrative (but before any of the “documents” are written), he has been cleared of the crime.  The guilty party has been found; the fate of the diamond is known; Blake is suspected of the theft by no one, no one at all.  Yet he goes to the trouble and expense of creating this book, this supposed true story, proving that he is not guilty.  Which is just what he would do if he were, in fact, guilty, if he were trying to prove not just his own innocence but that the case was impossible to reopen.

In this case, the section he wrote becomes the most interesting section of all.  I did not read it this way, because I did not realize that he was the master thief until I had finished the novel.  Next time I read it, I will blow the lid off Blake’s crime.

This will mean nothing to people who have not read the book, but I want to address those who have:  the misdirection is aimed at the Indians.  If Blake wants the diamond for himself, he has to convince the Indians that someone else has it.

Just a few weeks into the serialization of Barnaby Rudge (1841), Edgar Allan Poe wrote a magazine piece solving the mystery of the novel.  In an important sense, this was Poe's second detective story (he was the detective) after "The Murder in the Rue Morgue," published a few months earlier.  Dickens was, of course, not writing detective fiction, so he did not follow Poe’s predicted story at all, but as a mystery Poe’s idea was far better.  Even as a Dickens novel, Dickens’s idea was pretty poor, but that’s another issue.

I have no doubt that most of Collins readers, and Collins himself, answered Maitzen’s questions in the affirmative, but the important thing for later writers, of mysteries or otherwise, was that the questions now had to be asked, and if in this particular novel the answer was “yes,” one could imagine – and some people could actually write – novels with different answers.

The title is from Miss Clack’s narration, Ch. 2, where it does not refer to the content of this post.

I seem to be wandering off in search of Lord knows what, Lord knows where - some Moonstone narration

The Moonstone is about the theft of a diamond.  The conceit of the book is that one of the prime suspects, Franklin Blake, has asked the various parties involved to write up their knowledge of the case (“’in the interests of truth,’” Betteredge Ch. 1), just their own point of view, as a narrative.  He then assembles the pieces into the complete narrative.  Collins had employed an identical scheme in The Woman in White eight years earlier.  Like Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend, “[h]e do the Police in different voices.”

The conceit is preposterous, really, in the sense that almost no one would write an account the way these characters do, in so much detail, at such length, and so well.  The longest section in The Moonstone comes from Gabriel Betteredge, the elderly house steward at the scene of the crime – Betteredge turns in almost 80,000 words, an entire novel.  “I modestly declared myself to be quite unequal to the task imposed upon me – and I privately felt, all the time, that I was quite clever enough to perform it, if I only gave my own abilities a fair chance.”  Betteredge was just waiting for someone to ask.

The result is outstanding comedy – digressions, prejudices, false starts:

Still, this don't look much like starting the story of the Diamond—does it?  I seem to be wandering off in search of Lord knows what, Lord knows where.  We will take a new sheet of paper, if you please, and begin over again, with my best respects to you.  (end of Ch. 1) 

Betteredge is succeeded by the amazing Miss Clack, who ranks with some of Robert Browning’s characters among the greatest unreliable narrators of 19th century fiction. Miss Clack is an evangelical Christian, and a vengeful hypocrite, eager to report on her self-martyring virtues and others’ indulgent vices.  She is writing to settle scores, and also for pay.  And of course, like Blake, who is paying her, the truth:

I deeply feel being obliged to report such language, and to describe such conduct.  But, hemmed in, as I am, between Mr. Franklin Blake's cheque on one side and my own sacred regard for truth on the other, what am I to do?  (Miss Clack, Ch. 2)

“Deeply feel” as in “feel pain,” but of course she loves reporting the immorality of others, particularly if it involves, as it does here, the novel’s heroine flirting with the fellow for whom Miss Clack has sublimated longings.  This is also the passage where Miss Clack calls her aunt old and fat (“at dear Lady Verinder's age, and with dear Lady Verinder's autumnal exuberance of figure”).  Please see Professor Maitzen for more fine examples of Miss Clack.

The Moonstone is not, like The Ring and the Book, the same story told again and again from different angles, but rather one story told in fragments, each character contributing his own little piece, with Miss Clack as the extreme case, since it seems clear enough that she does not quite understand what story she is supposed to tell.  She has been tricked by Franklin Blake, although she does rebel, in the postmodern Chapter 6 of her narrative, which is a series of letters in which Miss Clack argues with her author – I mean with Blake – about what is allowed in her story.

“But, no – Miss C. has learnt Perseverance in the School of Adversity.  Her object in writing is to know whether Mr. Blake (who prohibits everything else) prohibits the appearance of the present correspondence in Miss Clack's narrative?  Some explanation of the position in which Mr. Blake's interference has placed her as an authoress, seems due on the ground of common justice.“

In a novel written later, much later, this chapter would be called postmodern.

These are fun, right?  Let’s do one more tomorrow.

something so hideous in the boy's enjoyment of the horror of the scene - more Moonstone, character, form, and ethics

Another thing that amazes me about The Moonstone is that Wilkie Collins never wrote a sequel or prequel reusing the professional detective, Sergeant Cuff,  who is a fine invention and became the prototype for legions.  It is not like Collins was above hackwork.  Sergeant Cuff is the perfect professional, yet cares more about roses than crime; he is unerringly observant and a fine intuitive psychologist, but not infallible; he quirkily whistles “The Last Rose of Summer” when in deep cogitation.  “I suppose it [the tune] fitted in somehow with his character” says one of the narrators (Ch. 12), true by definition, and a good tip for future writers – just substitute a violin for the roses and “little grey cells” for the whistling.

Sherlock Holmes is a reasonably original creation, but he is also in some part just Sergeant Cuff with the ratiocination of Poe’s Dupin stirred in.  That narrator mentioned above acts as Watson.  Cuff even has a single Baker Street Irregular.  A modern reader, who has seen a million of ‘em, might well find Cuff too familiar.

The result is that one central aspect of the modern detective novel, the long series of cases, was not the invention of Wilkie Collins.  I wonder why not.  But then I don’t understand why it took writers similarly long to imitate Poe’s detective Dupin, who did appear in three short stories.  I believe French writers were the leaders here.  Perhaps some credit should go to Dumas and his Musketeer adventures.  Now I am just blowing smoke.  Has anybody read – maybe I will ask this question every post – any of the Monsieur Lecoq novels by Émile Gaboriau?  They were written around the same time as The Moonstone and have recurring detectives.

Wilkie Collins is, of course, not writing a detective novel.  Any such label is retrospective.  How curious, then, that he also created or experienced one of the main problems with mysteries and brushed against another.  Rohan Maitzen clearly hits them both in a single paragraph in a 2008 post about her Mystery and Detective Fiction class.

The first is the “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd” problem, named after the Edmund Wilson essay criticizing the mystery genre, a defect that afflicts most of the best mysteries.  The solution to almost all detective stories is arbitrary, that is the fundamental problem, and thus: who cares?  A skillful writer maintains suspense by keeping alive for as long as possible multiple solutions to the mystery, the possibility that any of those people in the drawing room really could be the killer, but once we learn that one particular character is the killer it is often a disappointment.  The destabilized world is more interesting than the one that is restored to order.  Maybe I should call this the “Murder on the Orient Express” problem since Christie’s novel offers a parodic solution.

The Moonstone is about a theft, not a murder, but the point is the same.  As Collins moves toward the end of the novel, he has to spend his time ruling out the more interesting, surprising, or disturbing solutions.

Since the action is not a murder, Collins avoids the great ethical problem with so many mysteries, the trivialization of a horrifying crime – please see Maitzen’s post – but he nevertheless does not avoid it completely.  Gooseberry is Cuff’s boy assistant:

“Robbery!” whispered the boy, pointing, in high delight, to the empty box.

“You were told to wait down-stairs,” I said. “Go away!”

“And Murder!” added Gooseberry, pointing, with a keener relish still, to the man on the bed.

There was something so hideous in the boy's enjoyment of the horror of the scene, that I took him by the two shoulders and put him out of the room.  (Fifth Narrative, Ch. 1)

Collins was a prophet.  He knew us, many of us – me.

The composing influence of Standard Literature - Wilkie Collins, first and greatest

What amazes me about The Moonstone (1868), I mean what is right on the surface, what makes for the shallowest possible blog post, is not just that it is “first and greatest of the English detective novels,” as T. S. Eliot called it, but that it contains so much of what later became identified with detective fiction, “the same old futzing around with timetables and bits of charred paper and who trampled the jolly old flowering arbutus under the library window,” as Raymond Chandler described the standard detective novel template (“The Simple Art of Murder,” 1950).

Wilkie Collins got it right the first time, good and bad.  He created a mold from which thousands of later novels were stamped, a Standard Literature, readymade in one novel.

In The Moonstone, a character uses “Standard Literature” to refer to 18th century books, “all classical works; all (of course) immeasurably superior to anything produced in later times; and all (from my present point of view) possessing the one great merit of enchaining nobody’s interest, and exciting nobody’s brain” (Ezra Jennings, June 25th), a funny joke in context and much funnier given the subsequent history of the detective novel, by which I mean its eventual conquest of English culture, the Golden Age of detective fiction.

Have any of my readers tried an Edgar Wallace novel?  He wrote 170 of them, and almost a thousand short stories.  Said it took about three days to write one.  I have never read him, but that supposed fact stuck with me, as did this one (quoting Wikipedia): “In 1928 it was estimated that one in four books being read in the UK had come from Wallace's pen.”  I doubt the precision of the estimate, but not the approximate truth, that the craze for a specific kind of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s dwarfed, in intensity and length, recent fads for teen vampires and dystopias.  Add in Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, Erle Stanley Gardner, Of course, the interest has never really ended, even if much of the activity has shifted to television.  So many of us have such a strong taste for murders.

The Eliot quotation is from “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” written in 1927, so Eliot is right in the thick of things.  He is pro-detective novel:

Those who have lived before such terms as “highbrow fiction,” “thrillers” and “detective fiction” were invented realize that melodrama is perennial and must be satisfied.  If we cannot get this satisfaction out of what the publishers present as “literature,” then we will read – with less and less pretence of concealment – what we call “thrillers.”  But in the golden age of melodramatic fiction there was no such distinction.  The best novels were thrilling…

Examples: Bleak House and The Mill on the Floss (!).  That pretense is gone now, or has shifted to other kinds of books.  I wish readers arguing about so-called “Young Adult” literature would quote Eliot more.  He just wants the melodrama to be better, to be more like The Moonstone.

Some other things amaze me about The Moonstone.  One amazement per post, maybe.

Dickens and Collins trade ghost stories

The Dickens-Collins team gave us a well-made, amusing little murder story in the 1867 “No Thoroughfare.”  In an earlier collaboration, the 1857* “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices,” they abandoned any attempt at structure or sense and just let each author do his thing.  What things they do.

Following familiar types, Francis Goodchild thinks idleness means mountain climbing, scuba diving, and other vigorous non-productive activities, while Thomas Idle just wants to sit on the beach all day, or even better to sit by the hotel pool, since the beach is so far away, or best of all, why leave your room at all?  These two wander around northwest England.  That is more or less the frame.

Goodchild is sort of Dickens and Idle is kind of Collins.  They really did go on a tour of that region.  The division of labor is that Dickens writes the Goodchild parts and Collins writes the Idle parts.  Dickens writes about the characters climbing a mountain, much against Idle’s desires, while Collins writes about them coming down the mountain, giving Idle a terrible strain, his punishment for doing anything active, or else his gift since now he no longer has to climb any more mountains.

Dickens writes a ghost story, a good silly one, in which a hanged man tells of his crimes.  Here he is, just before Goodchild figures out he is a ghost (the reader will likely be way ahead of him):

His cravat appeared to trouble him.   He put his hand to his throat, and moved his neck from side to side.   He was an old man of a swollen character of face, and his nose was immovably hitched up on one side, as if by a little hook inserted in that nostril.   Mr. Goodchild felt exceedingly uncomfortable, and began to think the night was hot, and not cold.  (Ch. IV)

Collins has his own ghost story, although, following his Sensational method, there is in the end no ghost.  A man spends the night in a hotel room with a corpse.  I wonder if at some point it will seem to move:

When he looked at the bed, now, he saw, hanging over the side of it, a long white hand.
It lay perfectly motionless, midway on the side of the bed, where the curtain at the head and the curtain at the foot met.  Nothing more was visible.  The clinging curtains hid everything but the long white hand.

And so on.  Not bad.

My favorite Collins bit is midway through Chapter III, when we learn why Idle is so idle.  He reflects on three “disasters” in his life, three times when he made “the mistake of having attempted to be industrious” and was met with nothing but suffering.  “He had forfeited the comfortable reputation of being the one lazy member of the youthful community whom it was quite hopeless to punish.”  Poor fellow.  The few pages could be made into an Idler’s Manifesto if that did not take so much effort.

One last thing tomorrow, a bit of prime Dickens.

*  Yesterday I for some unknown reason put the story in 1868.  It comes last in the Oxford Christmas Stories book.  Maybe that confused me.

A Christmas murder from Dickens and Collins - All the lesser London churches strain their metallic throats

The year-end magazine stories of Charles Dickens were collected in 1871, just after his death, under the comical title Christmas Stories.  At first I was reading them for the sake of completeness and curiosity, but as the years passed (Dickens's years, not mine) they become more interesting.  The last one, “No Thoroughfare” (1867) (along with the 1857 “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices”), is co-written with Wilkie Collins.  The "Lazy Tour" is a picaresque ragbag, "No Thoroughfare" a short novel.  Both are good.  This was a period not just of Peak Dickens, but of Peak Collins – The Moonstone was published in 1868.

The title of “No Thoroughfare” is not so good.  I will stick with that one today.

“No Thoroughfare” is a kind of murder mystery.  Part of it is set in an orphanage.  A little bit of sensation, a little bit of tear-jerking.  It hits a lot of Dickens and\or Collins buttons.  They are recycling, but Dickens always recycled, that is how he moved forward.  A dangerous trip across a snow-filled Alpine pass is something new to Dickens.

The editor of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens edition has identified who wrote what, although I could mostly tell.  I want to save that for “The Lazy Tour,” though, where she does not say but I could always tell.

The mystery as such is not bad.  It is centered on a love triangle, and what else, I ask, given that the murder (attempted) in Our Mutual Friend (1864) and murder (completed, probably) in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) are caused by love triangles, with the man who cannot possibly win the woman becoming twisted and evil from frustration and jealousy – likely more from the latter.  Dickens had become occupied with the idea of evil, and this is how he explored it.  If the exploration is not so profound in “No Thoroughfare” it is still surprisingly interesting as a bridge between the two novels.

I would like to quote from the eventful and even exciting murder scene, but I am not sure the keenest touches make much sense without the context.  How about the very beginning, then:

Day of the month and year, November the thirtieth, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-five.  London Time by the great clock of Saint Paul’s, ten at night.  All the lesser London churches strain their metallic throats.  Some, flippantly begin before the heavy bell of the great cathedral; some, tardily begin three, four, half-a-dozen, strokes behind it; all are in sufficiently near accord, to leave a resonance in the air, as if the winged father who devours his children, had made a sounding sweep with his gigantic scythe in flying over the city.

It may not be the muddy megalosaurus that introduces Bleak House, but it is pure, clear Dickens.  It is another bit of recycling, too, evoking his little 1844 Christmas book The Chimes.  Those excessive commas are a guide to whoever is reading the passage aloud.  There is one more chime lagging, “lower than most of the rest,” that belongs to the orphanage and pulls me down from the steeples to the ground where a veiled lady “flutters to and fro,” about to launch the mystery.

The Best Books of 1862 - And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget.

Emily Dickinson was in the middle of a creative rush that had lasted several years and would last many more.  Or so it looks now – she was having doubts.  In 1862 she sent four poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson who had just published an article in The Atlantic giving advice to new writers about publishing their work.  Dickinson asked “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”  He said it was, yet Dickinson did not try to publish.

The hidden and lost works of the past, the ones that survive by chance and magic, make for such interesting stories.  But this is not the story of the Best Books of 1862.  1862 was the Year of the Best-seller.

The big bookish events in France were 1) the publication of Victor Hugo’s massive Les Misérables, his first novel in thirty years, and 2) controversial upstart Gustave Flaubert’s followup to Madame Bovary, the gory and insane Salammbô.  Flaubert was understandably nervous that he would be crushed by Hugo, but both novels were hits.  Hugo’s audience was broader, a genuine mass readership, and much more international.  Salammbô has never had much luck outside of France.

Another international hit, albeit with a much smaller audience than Hugo’s, was Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.  I believe this was the novel that really introduced Russian literature to Europe.  It also began within Russian literature a chain of attacks and responses that is unlike anything I know in any other literature, but that story has to wait until 1863.  One of the participants was Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose House of the Dead is from 1862.

Meanwhile the new craze in English fiction was the Sensation Novel: Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, No Name by Wilkie Collins, and even Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope.  The latter two could easily have been titled Lady _____’s Secret, and in the case of the Trollope should have been, since Orley Farm is a crummy title.  Trollope was only a half-hearted Sensationalist, divulging the secret about halfway through the novel, but at least he tried.

Lady Audley’s Secret was a dead book for a while, but scholars interested in women writers and so-called genre fiction resurrected it.  I just finished it and may write about it a bit after the holiday.

If the Collins and Trollope novels feel a bit second-tier compared to their best-known books, as does George Eliot’s Romola (which began serialization in 1862), English poetry was anything but.  Lucky Victorian poetry readers enjoyed, amidst the mound of poetry that now looks tediously unreadable,  George Meredith’s Modern Love, posthumous collections by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough, and the almost shockingly assured debut of Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems.  Here is one of the others, the first half of “Song”:

When I am dead my dearest,
    Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
    Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
    With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
    And if thou wilt, forget.

Édouard Manet’s 1862 “Music in the Tuileries” is in the London National Gallery.

"You forget how strong I am," she said. "Nothing hurts me." - No Name's artful ethics

"Thousands of women marry for money," she said. "Why shouldn't I?"  (Scene 4, Ch. 13; all quotations today are from this chapter)

We are about two-thirds of the way into No Name when Magdalen, whose scheme for revenge or perhaps justice involves marrying a rich idiot under false pretenses, asks this question.  I had already been asking it, off and on, for about a hundred pages.  To state the problem more narrowly, thousands (roughly) of characters in Victorian novels marry for money and nobody seems to give it a second thought.  Modern readers might, but in, let’s say, a Trollope novel the practice is perfectly acceptable, although not for the heroine, not ever, which suggests that there is some underlying doubt.  Still, no one calls marrying for money evil, do they?

Magdalen fears that her carefully planned, entirely justified fraudulent marriage will be an evil act, a violation of a sacrament:

That interval passed, they grew restless again, and pulled the two little drawers backward and forward in their grooves.  Among the objects laid in one of them was a Prayer-book which had belonged to her at Combe-Raven, and which she had saved with her other relics of the past, when she and her sister had taken their farewell of home.  She opened the Prayer-book, after a long hesitation, at the Marriage Service, shut it again before she had read a line, and put it back hurriedly in one of the drawers. After turning the key in the locks, she rose and walked to the window.

"The horrible sea!" she said, turning from it with a shudder of disgust – "the lonely, dreary, horrible sea!"

The key to that drawer ends up lost in the garden, tossed out the window.  Magdalen spends the single most remarkable chapter of No Name wrestling with her conscience, her debt to her family, and her religion.  The chapter lasts for four days and nights, each one with a new arc of despair.  Perhaps death is preferable to this marriage (which is, I remind myself, part of her own scheme).  If death is preferable, perhaps suicide is justified.

This central chapter is basically ten pages in which the nineteen year-old heroine of a Victorian comic novel struggles against the impulse to kill herself.  It is full of surprises:

"You forget how strong I am," she said. "Nothing hurts me."

Underlying everything is Magdalen’s sexual repugnance towards the groom, expressed symbolically, of course, likely as part of the sea-and-ship motif that runs through the chapter, as seen in Magdalen’s odd non sequitur above.  The sea is death, ships are life:

All the misery of her friendless position, all the wasted tenderness of her heart, poured from her in those words.

"Would you love me?" she repeated, hiding her face on the bosom of the child's frock.

"Yes," said the boy. "Look at my ship."

She looked at the ship through her gathering tears.

I am over-simplifying with the “sea = death” business, but not with the ships, one of which saves her life at the end of the chapter, and another of which wraps up the novel a couple hundred pages later.

The reason any of this works as fiction is that the symbolism, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, is Magdalen’s, just as the sense of good and evil is finally not that of the omniscient narrator or Victorian society but Magdalen’s own.  It is Magdalen’s struggle that is meaningful, that gives No Name its unusual ethical power.

The roused forces of Evil in herself - beginning an attempt at the ethics of No Name

First I spend two days gumming up the works with plot; now I am going to take a run at the ethics of No Name.  Not exactly my strengths.  Reading along with this is a kindness.

No Name is built on an ethical disconnect, one that has changed since the book was published.  The protagonist, Magdalen, suffers a great loss at the same time discovering that she is of illegitimate birth.  I have been calling her No Name, but she does, in fact, have a name, one that may have some extra-textual meaning, for the events of the beginning of the novel lead Magdalen to become a fallen woman of a sort.

Of what sort, though?  Few modern readers will put much weight on Magdalen’s illegitimacy.  We can imagine ourselves into the values of the time to some degree, but if the moral argument of the novel were about the exact timing of a marriage (strictly speaking the discovery is not that she is illegitimate but that she was) no one would care anymore.  In fact, the argument has more to do with her desire for vengeance than anything else.  Magdalen’s governess somehow detects her former ward’s new hardness and coldness (Norah is the elder sister):

Was the promise of the future shining with prophetic light through the surface-shadow of Norah's reserve, and darkening with prophetic gloom, under the surface-glitter of Magdalen's bright spirits?  If the life of the elder sister was destined henceforth to be the ripening ground of the undeveloped Good that was in her – was the life of the younger doomed to be the battle-field of mortal conflict with the roused forces of Evil in herself?  (Scene I, Ch. 14)

"Evil" seems awfully strong, and "ripening ground of the undeveloped Good" is ridiculous, although I too have been lazily accepting the governess’s ethics by describing Magdalen's motivation as "revenge."  What if, instead, she is righting an injustice?  In her mind, sometimes it's the one, sometimes the other, but still, Evil?

The thoughts in that passage are, however vaguely, the governess’s, but the narrator later baldly uses the same language (earlier, too, in the Preface):

That night no rest came to her.  That night the roused forces of Good and Evil fought their terrible fight for her soul – and left the strife between them still in suspense when morning came.  (Scene II, Ch. 3)

Collins later earns his language, but not until quite a bit later, in what may be the best scene in the book.  I want to save most of it for tomorrow.  He does not do it until he is two-thirds of the way into the novel, but Collins proves to be more ethically sophisticated than I had suspected.

No Name's structure - two kinds of surprises

I have wondered, since the last time I read Bleak House, why no other author in, as far as I knew, literary history had adapted the ingenious structure of that novel.  Half of it is “written” by  one of the characters, telling us about her large but limited part in an unusual adventure, while the rest is told in the usual omniscient, omnivorous Dickens third person.  The innovation, again, is: first person plus omniscient third.  I see how this device cannot work for every story – most stories – hardly any stories, but it solved so many problems for Dickens.  He never used it again, either.

Wilkie Collins adapts the Bleak House method to No Name.  The novel is built out of eight scenes told by the surprisingly intrusive all-knowing narrator separated by first-person interludes – long exchanges of letters, or diary entries.  Each scene is placed in a narrow setting (a country home, or a couple of apartments on the same street) with a single line of action and a subset of the novel’s cast of characters.  The scenes can be fairly involved – one of them (“Aldborough, Suffolk”) occupies almost a quarter of the novel – but they stay put.  Curtain down, scene ends, and the characters scatter.  Then the documents cover all of the intervening time and movement.

 Action (3rd), letters (1st), new action (3rd), Captain Wragge’s journal (1st, “I open these pages again, to record a discovery which has taken me entirely by surprise”), new location (3rd), and on to the end.  The first person sections are more epistolary than memoiristic, so they are not in themselves as innovative as Esther Summerson’s narration in Bleak House, but still, No Name offers a gentle corrective to the tricksy first-person Modernists I enjoy so much: you don’t always need to be so dang pure.

The structure may sound formulaic, but Collins uses it for ingenious plotty purposes.  A third-person scene cooks along with plenty of internal twistiness and surprises.  Mr. Omniscient moves from character to character, expressing his own opinion, commenting, chiding.  The action within the scene typically has plenty of little twists – secrets, discoveries, schemes exposed by counter-schemes, the usual stuff.

The scene ends and then – this is where Collins outdoes himself – the letters present a new set of surprises.  Just as I think the story is pointed in a particular direction, something in the letters knocks it onto another track.  Collins gleefully kills off minor characters, or arranges chance meetings, or tosses in a new legal complication (the usual Victorian nonsense with wills) – whatever he needs to do.  A few of the surprises had me howling (mentally, quietly).  He even keeps a sort of shadow novel going in the letters, the novel behind the one I'm reading.  This is the fun of the tricky plot, yes, that the story never goes exactly where I think it is going to go?  At the end, the very end, it finally does, I guess.  All of the possibilities were finally closed off.  Until then, Collins kept me off-kilter.

All I am trying to say is:  telling the story one way allows certain kinds of surprises, telling the story another way allows other kinds.  Collins, like Dickens in Bleak House, figured out how to use both kinds in one story.

Geez, two days of writing to get to that.  Tomorrow I’m going to work on a single little scene.  Do some reading.  Nothing but quotations.

No Name - a Wilkie Collins headfake

The Woman in White was a smash hit for Wilkie Collins in 1860; No Name is the 1862 followup.  Those of you who have written a bestselling novel, or perhaps had a big hit record, or, like me, have read about people who have done so, will know that Collins faced all sorts of new anxieties, especially the problem of writing a book as good without merely repeating himself.  No Name is comparably good, and Collins repeats himself only in knowing, jokey ways.  Perhaps he experienced no anxiety at all.

The repetitions are, roughly:  two sisters are at the center of the story; one of the sisters behaves quite differently than I was first led to believe; characters who at first appear to be grotesques or caricatures move into central roles and achieve a pleasing degree of fictional reality; some of the story is told through documents.

Collins begins the novel with a clever expectations-defeating trick.  A happy couple lives in a jolly country house with their blissful daughters.  One of the daughters gets tangled up in a shocking affair – an amateur theatrical performance.  Romantic complications ensue.  Is Collins writing some sort of domestic novel – something like Trollope, who had just had his own first smash hit with Framley Parsonage.  Perhaps Collins has given up the Hitchcockian thriller game which he had more or less just invented.  I am pretending I am a contemporary reader, ignorant of The Moonstone (1868).

Suddenly – I will become increasingly vague about the details of the plot – there is a crash and the novel turns into a melodrama, perhaps designed to evoke tears of pathos or to reform a social wrong.  We learn the meaning of the title: a character has “No Name,” no rights, no property because she is of  illegitimate birth, a discovery caused by the melodramatic crash.

Collins is about ten percent of the way through the book, which perhaps does not seem like much, but this is a long book.  I remember wondering when the book was going to turn into a Wilkie Collins novel.  But here it comes:  No Name has been cheated.  No Name vows revenge!  And No Name is not exactly the Count of Monte Cristo, who is super-strong, unfathomably wealthy, and owns a steamboat, but is instead an eighteen year old girl without rights, property, etc.  Strangely, both the Count and No Name are Masters of Disguise.

What I am getting at is at this point the novel has, after some teasing, turned into a Wilkie Collins novel, with great promise for twisty craziness, and that Collins has set himself a fine challenge.  How can No Name avenge herself and reclaim her name.  It is impossible; there is no way.  What could possibly occupy the next five hundred pages?

Tomorrow I will try to write about how the plot works without writing anything about the plot, which will be a good challenge for me.  Collins employs an ingenious device.  The supporting characters, as in the other good Collins novels, are so much fun; I might write about that.  There is a particularly good chapter I might investigate.  At some point, I should quote at least one line from the book.

I make no apologies for this extremely prosy paragraph. I have been ordered to write it. (How interesting this is!) - the Wilkie Collins griffins

The Woman in White has spurred or focused my puzzlement over the role of enjoyment in criticism because it is one of the most sheerly enjoyable Victorian novels.  Stretches of prose are functionally  ordinary (“Half an hour later I was speeding back to London by the express train,” that sort of thing), and the plot is, stepping back a bit, nonsense, but perfectly paced nonsense, thrilling nonsense.  Collins attributes the success of the story not to its ingenuity but to the characters who drive it, to “their existence as recognizable realities” (Preface, longer quotation here).  This sounds suspiciously like a version of Ruskin’s question: Is it so?  Some – I do not think all, but some – of the characters in The Woman in White are “so,” wonderfully “so.”

Richard at La Caravana de Recuerdos has been reading an amazing book, a thousand-page diary of Adolfo Bioy Casares entirely about his friendship and conversations with Jorge Luis Borges.  The book sounds as bookishly juicy as The Life of Johnson.  In a passage Richard just posted (translation his), Borges and Bioy Casares assemble a list of “lifelike characters”:

Pinkerton from The Wrecker; the father from Douglas' The House with the Green Shutters…  Cousin Basilio's heroine… Shylock; perhaps King Lear (not Macbeth)… Martín Fierro; Grandet and Eugénie… Jesus; Count Fosco and the paralytic uncle from The Lady in White [sic, English in original]; according to my father, Félicité from Flaubert's Un coeur simple and the woman that's in The Crime of Father Amaro.

I have heavily trimmed the list to emphasize my own recent and upcoming reading.  If there was any doubt about why Borges is one of my guiding figures, I can see here how my entirely arbitrary and random matrix of tastes lines up so well with his.  Not my point, though, which is more that several people are reading The Crime of Father Amaro soon and it is not too late to join in and meet “the woman.”  No, that’s not my point either.

Count Fosco and Mr. Fairlie, the paralytic uncle, are just the characters I pick as the ones with the most vivid “existence,” the ones who Collins was able to infuse with “real” imaginative truth.  Fosco is a villain who is observed and described in the heroine’s diary, and whose written confession is the imaginative climax of the novel; Fairlie is a peripheral plot device who only plumps up during his own firsthand testimony, which mostly consists of this sort of thing:

That is to say, I had the photographs of my pictures, and prints, and coins, and so forth, all about me, which I intend, one of these days, to present (the photographs, I mean, if the clumsy English language will let me mean anything) to present to the institution at Carlisle (horrid place!), with a view to improving the tastes of the members (Goths and Vandals to a man).

I was very unreasonable – I expected three days of quiet.  Of course I didn’t get them.

I make no apologies for this extremely prosy paragraph.  I have been ordered to write it.

He waved his horrid hand at me; he struck his infectious breast; he addressed me oratorically – as if I was laid up in the House of Commons.

That last “he” is Count Fosco, and much of Fairlie’s letter is his version of the encounter between the novel’s two best characters.  Readers of Samuel Beckett’s novels might detect something familiar here.  This is the Borgesian definition, and Ruskinian, and Amateur Readerian, of “lifelike.”  Not that the character resembles an actual living creature, but that his creator truly saw the imaginary beast.  Mr. Fairlie and Count Fosco are like Ruskin’s Lombardian griffin, imaginary but true.

I will leave Count Fosco’s extraordinary letter alone, except to give Collins more credit: the villain’s confession contains almost no information that a half-awake reader does not already know, so is functionally almost useless, except that it is the best thing in the book, all due to the character’s force of personality, to his language.  “(Pass me, here, one exclamation in parenthesis.  How interesting this is!)”

Most of the other characters are like Ruskin's Renaissance griffin.  I have seen reviewers of the novel single out the heroine, Marian Halcombe, as a great character, but I have had trouble seeing how she is not more than a high-quality adventure novel heroine, one of those Strong Female Characters we are trained to praise.  I ask her fans for a passage, or line, or action that pulled her out of the book, something that belongs just to her.  Something not relative to novels of her time (where I see no shortage of plucky heroines, honestly), but to the timeless.  Where does she feed the monkey, so to speak?

Their feelings pleasantly stirred and their fancy gayly occupied - Ruskin's suspicion of enjoyment - Is it so?

There is the certain test of goodness and badness, which I am always striving to get people to use.  As long as they are satisfied if they find their feelings pleasantly stirred and their fancy gayly occupied, so long there is for them no good, no bad.

I am still in Chapter X, “The Use of Pictures,” of the third volume of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1856), an idea-packed masterpiece of rhetorical prose.  Many of the ideas are wrong, or, provocative.  For example, it is clear enough that for many consumers of art a pleasantly stirred fancy is the exact definition of good, the more pleasure the better.

Anything may please, or anything displease, them; and their entire manner of thought and talking about art is mockery, and all their judgments are laborious injustices.

I am just continuing the quotation here.  The end, Ruskin’s “certain test,” will not be satisfying, I promise.  “Injustice” seems awfully strong, no?  I enormously enjoy seeing Ruskin work himself up to this high pitch.  Pleasure-based judgment of art has its narrow use, the equivalent of matching my tastes against a blogger’s star ratings.  I discover with experience that I enjoy any 4 or 5 star book rated by my favorite book blogger, BookGullet, while I consistently enjoy only the 5 star books chosen by BookGrump, and I never get along with even the 5 star books of BookGoon.  I am comparing my arbitrary matrix of tastes against everyone else’s and using the results of the algorithm to read bloggers and their recommended books.

So, not an injustice, or even a mockery, but for the reader who arbitrarily values knowledge as much or more than experience (myself, John Ruskin), frustrating.  I learn a lot about the taste of readers when I wander around book blogs, but not so much about the literature they read.

But let them, in the teeth of their pleasure or displeasure, simply put the calm question, -- Is it so?  Is that the way a stone is shaped, the way a cloud is wreathed, the way a leaf is veined? and they are safe.  They will do no more injustice to themselves nor to other men; they will learn to whose guidance they may trust their imagination, and from whom they must forever withhold its reins.

“Simply” – oh please!  In Chapter VIII of the same book, Ruskin compares two carved griffins, and preposterously, convincingly demonstrates how one is so, and one is not so – “the Lombard workman did really see a griffin in his imagination, and carved it from the life.”  So the “so,” the Truth of a work of art, even of a drawing of a leaf, is an imaginative truth.

The Woman in White is a mystery and a thriller, and Collins’ skill with pacing and tension must still be a model for suspense writers.  It is an easy book to enjoy, even if it is often a silly book.  Is it so?  Obviously not, except that, at its best, it is.  Collins really did see it, and wrote it from life.

There's a thread to follow tomorrow.

Enjoyment - romances, science fiction, reading

I must ask permission, as I have sometimes done before, to begin apparently a long way from the point. (John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. III, Ch. X)

The problem with invoking Ruskin like this is that he knew the point at which he would end.  I intuit my point.

I have said, here and in comments elsewhere, that I am not so interested in the enjoyment of books, not just your enjoyment, but even my own.  Typical Wuthering Expectations contrarianism, except that I mean it, as I always do.  Pleasure, our reasons for enjoying anything, are so arbitrary.  Anyway, I enjoy literature, reading as an activity.  I even enjoy the books I do not enjoy.  Your enjoyment of a book is likely a much more interesting subject than mine.

The Argumentative Old Git does not enjoy science fiction, as he discusses here – since I am not going to mention it otherwise, his catalogue of the praise of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker is hilariously excellent.  Himadri has given the genre the old college try, and then some, and has concluded that whatever the merits of the best books, he is finished for now.  Some well-meaning commenters urge him to keep trying, but they fail to understand the statistics of the problem.  Himadri is engaging in sequential analysis, which was mathematically formalized during World War II as an efficient way to test explosive shells for duds.  Rather than fire off the entire lot of shells, the tester can stop once a statistically significant number of shells have misfired.  Himadri has read enough misfires, given his sample size, to call it quits.

Rohan Maitzen is engaging in the same exercise with romance novels.  So far, the results are more positive, although she understands that she has not yet fired enough shells to make a statistically sound judgment.  The criteria, again, is enjoyment – “amusing and entertaining.”  My own experience with romance novels is similar, although my pool is awfully narrow.

Or is it?  This fascinating post at Something More led me to the results of a methodologically sound romance readers’ poll, a list of the best or favorite or “top” 100 romance novels, as of 2007, as determined by a large and well-read group of voters.  I see that I have read and enjoyed three of them: Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Jane Eyre, the only 19th century novels on the list.  Three Georgette Heyer novels (1932-1965) follow, and then seven novels from the 1980s (Judith McNaught is the big name), meaning that 87 of the best 100 novels are from the last 20 years.  I wonder what other genres or audiences would give a similar result.  Romance seems to have an unstable canon.  New novels quickly replace old ones.  Would I enjoy any of those 87 as much as I enjoy Jane Eyre?

I have been thinking about writing up the case against the enjoyment of literature, but I have concluded that the point is too obvious.  To read well, we should cultivate patience, question our preferences, moderate our consumption of junk, and when writing about reading try to imagine ourselves in the place of others.  Consider sacrificing short-term for long-term enjoyment (study, cultivate tastes, read some quantity, however small, of dull but useful books), all within the inevitable constraints of time, energy, and concentration.  Everyone knows this, already, so enough of that.

I am still writing about The Woman in White, if I can figure out how to return to it.  Through Ruskin, somehow.

The Woman in White, lookalikes, and the ol' switcheroo

The Woman in White contains a pair of lookalike characters.  The “ominous likeness” is introduced early in the novel, as it must be, because the reader needs to be on the alert for the only possible reason for using lookalikes.  At some point, there’s gonna be a switcheroo.  In the service, presumably, of some preposterous scheme.

The novel is told in first-person documents, mimicking firsthand testimony (the “documents” are assembled for a lawsuit that never happens), and much of the fun of the novel lies in seeing events from more than one angle, or, even more fun, discovering how the piece missing from one person’s observation is filled in by someone else.  But the lookalikes are conspicuously absent.  Their story is always told by someone else.

The documentary technique is perfect for the ol’ switcheroo because it leaves all sorts of gaps when the lookalikes are out of the narrator’s, and thus the reader’s, observation.  The savvy reader, trained by Alfred Hitchcock, will pounce at each gap, anytime both lookalikes are offstage.  Ah ha – they switched!  And I attend carefully to every gesture, every stray phrase, of the lookalike who has come back on stage.  No, I guess they have not switched yet, she seems to be the same character she was before.  But here comes another gap –  !

Collins is good at teasing me, allowing for the possibility of several false switches.  His novel branched as I read it.  Perhaps the story could include multiple switches, with the villains and heroes constantly shifting the lookalikes back and forth to confound each other.  Or perhaps – the most devilish possibility – perhaps there is no switch at all, just the looming possibility of a switch.  I ask the reader familiar with the story of The Woman in White to imagine what happens to the last quarter of the novel, and to the end, if the lookalikes never switch places, but the other characters believe that they do.  This is not the novel Collins wrote, but rather one he came very close to writing.  Just a few tweaks, and there it is.  In fact – well, never mind.

I am not particularly familiar with Hitchcock, but I am astounded by how much he has pilfered from The Woman in White, how many devices and clichés he has repurposed.  But I hardly needed Hitchcock to see what Collins was doing, to be on the alert for the lookalike switcheroo.  Contemporary readers must have been just as suspicious.

The Woman in White was serially published  in All the Year Round from November 26, 1859 through August 25, 1860.  All the Year Round was owned and edited by Charles Dickens, and was the home for one of his most popular novels, A Tale of Two Cities, which first appeared in the April 30, 1859 and ended in the November 26, 1859 issue.  That’s right, A Tale of Two Cities ends and is immediately followed by the first piece of The Woman in White (pdf).

Two novels in a row, both with lookalikes switching places.  I speculated a bit about the lookalikes in the Dickens novel.  I particularly appreciated how Dickens laid the foundation for a revelation about why or how the lookalikes look alike, but never bothered to fill in the details.  What difference does it make, after all?  The suggestions are at least as interesting as the answer.  Collins, for whatever reason, provides an answer, the exact same answer Dickens would have given.  I did not need it here either, but there it is.

Her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness - the visibly deformed The Woman in White

Descriptions of people, of characters in novels, particularly thorough introductory top-to-bottom inventory descriptions, are typically useless, by which I mean artistically useless, because the details are so often unconnected and almost random, and useless to the reader who has no hope of remembering anything but a general impression.  All of that detail just disintegrates.

Here is an amusing exception, from early in The Woman in White (1860).  It is the narrator’s first view of a major character, Marian Halcombe, from a distance, with her back turned:

Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. (The First Epoch, VI)

Readers of Wilkie Collins know that the nature of the description changes when the woman turns around, but I am not so interested in that right now.  What caught my attention was, of course, the peculiarity of the description.  The “easy, pliant firmness” of the head,  for example, or that “natural circle.”  Who talks or writes like this?

In fact, the description is natural for the character, because he is a drawing master.  He is breaking his subject down into her component parts, as he might do if he were to draw her, or as he might instruct a student.  I would guess that a search through contemporary guides to drawing would unearth that “natural circle.”

It’s a nice touch.  Too bad Collins does not follow through with more passages like this, but I suspect he feared making his hero – the narrator is the novel’s action hero, so to speak – too eccentric.  His (the hero’s) later descriptions are more conventional.  The genuinely eccentric Mr. Fairlie has a face that is “thin, worn, and transparently pale, but not wrinkled,” eyes that are “rather red round the rims of the eyelids,” hair that is “soft to look at,” "little, womanish, bronze-leather slippers" and so on, lots of nice writing but much too much to remember, well-suited  to create a strong impression of Fairlie’s personality, if not his actual appearance.

Well, hair that is “soft to look at” is kind of strange.  My point is that the first look at Mr. Fairlie does a good job of creating the Mr. Fairlie who I carried through the rest of the novel, but does not tell us much of interest about the character who describes him, while the catalogue of Marian’s form a few pages earlier reveals the mentality of the narrator too.  That’s it; that’s my point.  Collins works on the idea throughout the book, unfortunately indulging himself more when the minor characters are narrating, "unfortunately" because the minor characters are weirder and funnier. The major characters are visibly deformed by stays, the conventional constraints of being the hero or heroine (of the strong or weak variety) of a Victorian novel.

Perhaps I will think of something else to say about The Woman in White later.