Real life was as interesting as ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ – Daniel Deronda's Real and Ideal

The second big innovation or experiment in Daniel Deronda is the one readers dislike so much, the joining of two stories written in discordant styles.  Last spring Levi Stahl and Maggie Bandur wrote an interesting series of pieces on the novel, put together as they were reading the book, in which they both follow the usual path (in fourteen detailed posts): delight at Eliot’s charming, ambiguous recasting of Emma followed by disillusion at the direction the Jewish part of the novel eventually takes, especially its wooden characters.  The word that they both use is “believe” – they do not believe in Deronda’s side of the novel, suggesting they in some way believe in Gwendolen Harleth’s side.

Stahl and Bandur are right, that one set of characters is lifelike and rounded (and fun) while another set – “We should stamp every possible world with the flatness of our own inanity” says Deronda in a not entirely unrelated context (Ch. 36).  Many readers respond: “You’re telling me!”  But I’ll argue that although “flat” is accurate, “inane” is not.  What looks at first like a failure of execution is in fact a success, but of concept.  Perhaps the concept is a failure.  I thought it worked all right.

Crudely, the marriage half of the novel is Realism, the Jewish half Idealism.  The former is English, the latter German.  Daniel Deronda is a fairy tale hero, the boy of dubious parentage who after trials discovers that he is a prince.  In one sense, I mean what he learns about his heritage, and in another I mean that although he is not actually a prince his mother turns out to be a princess, which, since I was on to the pattern by this point, was almost rubbing it on a little thick.

Deronda slips into fairy tale world when he rescues a princess (there are several instances where he crosses a threshold into Jewish Wonderland).  He gives her shelter in some kind of fairy cave, inhabited by Queen Mab – the fairy who presents the princess with the “tiny felt slippers” that are like “sheaths of buds.”  These slippers are too large for the princess, even though the fairies are themselves tiny, “all alike small, in due proportion with their miniature rooms…  All four, if they had been wax-work, might have been packed easily in a fashionable lad’s traveling trunk”  (Ch. 18).  That is one strange sentence.  But these characters, the Meyrick family, are meant to be a kind of wax-work. 

They so thoroughly accepted Deronda as an ideal, that when he was gone the youngest set to work, under the criticism of the two elder girls, to paint him as Prince Camaralzaman.  (Ch. 16)

They have moved to the Arabian Nights, but you see what I am talking about.  This is before we get to Mordecai, who a kind of philosophical or mystical Ideal.  Or see Chapter 37, in which the prince, princess, and little fairy women try to define the Ideal, but in aesthetic terms:

“If people have thought what is the most beautiful and the best thing, it must be true. It is always there.”

“Now, Mirah, what do you mean?” said Amy.

“I understand her,” said Deronda, coming to the rescue.  “It is a truth in thought though it may never have been carried out in action.  It lives as an idea.”

It is possible that this kind of scene is not well suited to the novel as we now think of it.  Try the long debate in the Philosopher’s Club, Ch. 42, for an even more dubious example.

I obviously have my own doubts about how some of this works, although I question specific scenes, not the notion of combining such clashing aesthetic ideas.  This was not my problem with Eliot.  I don’t actually believe in any of the characters.  They are all waxworks to me, some molded to fool the eye, some more abstract.  Eliot’s characterization in the Jewish Daniel Deronda is no different, in principle or execution than that in the idealist German fiction of Goethe, Stifter, or Hoffmann.  Mordecai and the fairy sisters are as well-rounded as the wizard and his snake daughters in The Golden Pot.

This would be the time to note the curious similarities between Hoffmann’s recurring musician Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler and Daniel Deronda’s musician named Musical Instrument (Klesmer), both of whom are able to move between the real world and the magical world presumably somehow by means of their special status as musicians.

I don’t always enjoy what Eliot is doing with all this, but it is a bold move.

The post’s title is from Chapter 4.  The joke is that most readers now - almost all - would find Jane Austen's (and apparently Gwendolen Harleth's) favorite novel to be the most boring novel ever written.

Alvin Lucier's Music 109 - Your professor is prepared.

Yesterday I was trying to get to a wonderful book, Music 109 by Alvin Lucier (2012), an adaptation of the music history class Lucier has been teaching at Wesleyan University for the last forty years.

Lucier is, in the sense I was discussing, a conceptual composer.  His compositions break music down into sound.   He hooks a wire up to some electronics and lets it vibrate – that’s a composition (Music on a Long Thin Wire). In his best known work, I am sitting in a room (1969), Lucier records himself describing the piece, and then records a playback of the recording, and then records a playback of the playback, repeating until the acoustics of the room have destroyed any trace of speech aside from its rhythm.  What remains, surprisingly, is music, or something very much like it (“Speech became music.  It was magical”).  The process of the creation of the piece is crucial to understanding what it is, to even know what I am hearing.  Why would anyone record this uninteresting text, which begins with “I am sitting in a room”?

It was crucial to avoid poetic references – poems, prayers, anything with high aesthetic value.  I felt that would only get in the way.  I wanted the acoustic exploration to be paramount, the room acoustics and its gradual transformation to be the point of the piece.  (90)

The finished recording is forty-five minutes long.  The distorting acoustical transitions are small and the piece moves slowly.

As César Aira writes, in an essay on John Cage and conceptual art that I swear I did not know about until Rise pointed it out to me yesterday, “what we think of as the ‘work’ can be the method by which the work is made, rather than the actual work itself, the work acting as a kind of documentary appendix which serves only as a means of deducing the process from which it arose.”

Although Lucier also wants to hear the results of the process.  He likes the surprise.  I believe I have only made it all the way through I am sitting in a room three times, although I have listened to parts of it many times.  I must have first come across Lucier in William Duckworth’s survey 20/20: 20 New Sounds of the 20th Century (1999), which included I am sitting in a room alongside Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Ives’s Concord Sonata, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue as one of the seminal works of the century.  Really?  Yes, at this point, yes.

Since Lucier is now part of music history, his music history class is his music history.  The first work discussed is Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 4.  Beethoven appears as the author of the Grosse Fuge, “the only nineteenth-century work that can exist on a wholly modern music concert” (183).  The major figures are John Cage, Robert Ashley, La Monte Young – people Lucier knew and worked with.  Chapter titles cover forms (Opera, String Quartets), but also concepts (Indeterminacy, Repetition) and who knows what – Bell Labs, Words, Tape Recorders.

The prose is conversational, although secretly filled with pedagogical mines designed to explode years later.  I should try to write more like Lucier.  He gets to the point.

When [Cage] was at Wesleyan in the Sixties, he taught a course in which he sent everyone to the library to find a different book.  The students used chance operations to generate the call numbers.  They all came back with different books on different subjects, some even in different languages.  Cage thought it was a stupid idea for everybody to read the same thing.  He thought it would be more interesting if everyone read something different.  (13)

How wonderful that with the internet a curious reader can now listen along with whatever crazy piece Lucier mentions, no matter how obscure.  How wonderful Lucier’s class must be.

Let’s pack up our book bags and go into the tunnels under the Music Studios, the acoustics there are very reverberant.  I brought along a pitch pipe.  (Your professor is prepared)…  Let’s carry our perfect fifth with us into the tunnels and perform La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7.  (102)