Monday, August 6, 2012

What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations? - or, a note on how to read a Victorian novel

This is gonna be a rambler.

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?' (opening line of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

Alice will grow up, I predict, to be a great reader of Victorian novels, which generally had plenty of both.  What a shame that novels have lost their illustrations.  I am with the Victorians on that one.

Rohan Maitzen has written an amusing guide on How to Read a Victorian Novel.  It has pictures and conversation and is useful, so Alice will be happy.  Most of Rohan's how-to secretly applies to all literature, non-Victorian and less novel, but not all of it (e.g., “they will be aiming at reforming you as much as (or more than) they aim at reforming society,” an idea that is not uniquely Victorian but is disproportionately represented).

I want to extend one of Rohan’s precepts:  “it will help to put aside modern(ist) assumptions about what novels should and shouldn’t do.”  She is right, it will help, sometimes enormously.  I have made runs at a number of literary traditions and periods, Classical and modern, European and otherwise.  Early on, every time, everything was a mystery.  I grasped what I could.  As I read more, though, obscurities lightened and mysteries evaporated.  Sometimes a repeated reference finally fit into its contextual slot, and other times the issue is one of vocabulary, when an archaic usage suddenly becomes clear, like the 17th and 18th century use of the word “aversion”:

LYDIA  Madam, I must tell you plainly, that had I no preferment for any one else, the choice [of suitor] you have made would be my aversion.  (Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals, 1775).

We should bring this usage back.  This play is on my mind since, oddly, it is appears in detail in the Willkie Collins novel I am reading.  Back to my point.

The point is that the answer to any problem is: read more.  The answer is not: throw the book aside as hopeless.  Renaissance Italian epics, Elizabethan plays, and Siglo de Oro poetry were constructed on aesthetic principles that are not the same as those of the contemporary novel, of any contemporary novel, but they have their own logic and illogic that can be deduced and inferred by the basic act of reading, and re-reading, and reading more.  Reading all of Shakespeare is a great idea; reading Shakespeare along with much of Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and John Webster (and Philip Sidney and John Donne and so on) is a better idea.  The Shakespeare is better, and in some sense easier, after reading the Webster and Donne, and vice versa.

Victorian novels are an 800 page breeze compared to that stuff, but the idea is the same.  I cannot emphasize how much reading Walter Scott and Lord Byron has affected my understanding of later Victorian novels, or the extent that Thomas Carlyle turns up in Dickens and Gaskell, or how Thackeray’s voice in Vanity Fair is absorbed by Charlotte Brontë and Anthony Trollope.

Well, I know I have not reached any surprising conclusion here – anyone who wanders by Wuthering Expectations understands the idea.  Yet every example I mention was a surprise to me not so long ago.  I could redo the argument with German or French or Russian fiction (Scott and Byron help with all of them).  And I am just reading as an amateur – the professional specialists find even more, at the admittedly high cost of diminishing returns and increasing tedium.  Fortunately for me they write down the best discoveries and share them.  Put aside your assumptions, like Rohan suggests.  Learn to use new assumptions.

Also, though, do not set aside your assumptions while reading a Victorian novel!  I should save that idea for tomorrow.

22 comments:

  1. And we can say this, not just for any and every variety of literature, but I think for all art. I recently watched "The Big Sleep," and I need to make just as much of an effort to put myself in the generic conventions of 1940s noir film as I do in Victorian novels, or modernist novels, or 18th century epistolary literature. Themed reading for the win! We must go deep to get what is going on, even if at least some of the alleged universality of the "classics" are accessible regardless. There is so much more if we can only be open to it and, hopefully, train ourselves to recognize it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not that it will matter much to anyone's assumptions about the "generic conventions" into which one should immerse oneself, but the script for The Big Sleep was written by Leigh Brackett, she of an endless string of science fiction novels.

      Delete
  2. So, what you're saying is 'read more, read widely'?

    I think the expression is preaching to the converted... ;)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, what's a Victorian novel anyway?

    ReplyDelete
  4. What's a Victorian novel - now that is just what I want to write about later today. I am going to borrow your recent Borges posts.

    Tony - I am actually saying, in this post, "read more, read narrowly."

    Nicole is right, no art is all that different. I have had the same experience with, say, Italian Renaissance paintings. I used to look at them a lot, but coming back to them after some time I had to reboot and load the old software - how do you look at these things? Ah, right, I remember. Assume I am looking at second-rate paintings in a regional French museum, not Raphael in Rome.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "read more, read narrowly."

      That's not what I got from your post, Tom. I read it as you arguing that the wider context and a sense of history are important. To read what came before and what is being written at the same time, in the same country and in others. To understand who the writer is following and writing against.

      Delete
  5. I recently read two blog posts, one complaining about the position of women in The Tale of Genji and one complaining about all the preaching going on in a George Gissing novel. Both readers were bringing a modern sensibility to material that is no longer modern, and having a difficult time because of it.

    I think a lot of Victorian fiction, in particular, has fallen out of favor becuase of its "preachiness." Readers need to be able to read the material like it was meant to be read, as a good sermon. Sermons used to be a literary genre of their own, published and sold in collections read by the general public.

    As for Tale of Genji, there really is not much point bringing a modern sensibility to that one.

    I just may read How to Read a Victorian Novel.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Miguel, the semantics (because you're right) - if I spend a year reading early modern Italian literature (say 75% of my reading), am I reading widely or narrowly? I am for these purposes calling that narrow. Perhaps a better distinction would be focused versus scattered.

    Jenny's Genji post has gotten an amazing response. I have never seen anything quite like it. I should read and write about Genji!

    Henry Adams's argument about the way to approach Chartres is similar to what you say about Victorian novels. Become a medieval French worshiper of Mary, then all will be clear. The complication is Adams's irony. Novels that are best read as sermons should perhaps be left to the professional readers.

    I strongly disagree with the idea that a reader should not bring a modern sensibility to Genji. A preview of where I am going: learn how to read Heian literature like a native, yes, but also bring your Modernist tools, and your early modern tools, and your Classical tools. Have 'em all ready. Catapults, gunpowder, battering rams, but also infiltration and subterfuge, and maybe bribe someone to leave a gate unlocked.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. How does a modern reader not bring a modern sensibility to a work from the past? That's a trick I'd like to learn. Anyway, it cuts both ways, I think, in that a modern sensibility can highlight not only elements that may strike one as scandalous - i.e. the treatment of women in Genji (a book I have not read) - but also bring to light elements that were ahead of their time and weren't appreciated at the time the works were written, or other elements that suddenly speak to us across the ages. I find it helpful to humbly keep in mind Zhou En-Lai when he was asked by Kissinger for his opinion about the lasting impact of the French Revolution, to which he responded: "Too early to say."

      Delete
    2. First - right, you can't. Second - Rohan's word is "assumptions," which is a whole 'nother thing. She uses "show, don't tell" as an example of a Bad Assumption.

      Otherwise, you have more or less written my next post.

      Delete
  7. Are you enjoying "No Name," then? My wife and I couldn't put it down.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Am I enjoying No Name - yes, quite a lot, but I am so early in it that there is no real suspense. Some teenagers just put on a play! Collins is still stringing me along before the real story hits.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The real story has already begun, but the "sensation" builds slowly and steadily, reaching its breakneck pace at a point that, having read the whole book, you will imagine occurred much earlier than in fact it did.

      Delete
    2. Good. Collins is unfolding a trick. Good, good.

      Delete
  9. Love this line: "The point is that the answer to any problem is: read more." I couldn't agree more! The first time I picked up Murakami's collection of short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, I threw it down in despair. Admittedly not Victorian, I still didn't feel I could grasp what he was doing: slice of life, Bellezza, not the traditional story with a beginning, middle and end. But, it took reading more to get it.

    As for Little Woman, would you like to consider November for a shared read? Let's talk, as it's a book I've never finished, although I started it many times over. It's certainly time for me to read more (to the end) there!

    ReplyDelete
  10. First, November is great for Little Women. I have made a shocking discovery, though - Little Women as we know it is actually two books! LW (1868) and a sequel, Good Wines (1869). I'm going to count it as two books read, anyway.

    For some reason Faulkner shoves all of his Big Sleep co-writers aside. I have no idea who contributed what. Brackett also co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back! And I have in fact read two of her novels, The Long Tomorrow and The Sword of Rhiannon, although I remember nothing about the latter.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Leigh Brackett also wrote the script for Altman's The Long Goobye, which is the Raymond Chandler adaptation!

      Delete
    2. I have only seen the Bogart and Dick Powell versions of Marlowe. Weirdly, this all came up as a topic of discussion - including the camera POV Lady of the Lake - in a novel I recently read. And that novel was - um - maybe the Sergio de la Pava book? Or the Andrea Camilleri mystery? My poor memory. I just read it!

      Delete
    3. I obviously should have written "co-written" about The Big Sleep script, but I like the Brackett story so much - how Howard Hawks specifically wanted her involved - that for me Faulkner just gets lost in the haze. She came to mind as I'm currently reading her science fiction parody, Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon.

      Delete
    4. I myself was so shocked reading the credits to see Faulkner's name up there (since I know Chandler himself wrote screenplays as well, though I knew he hadn't written that one), that I completely missed who the other two credited were.

      Of course, "The Big Sleep" is a particularly funny example of all this, because the novel itself doesn't actually make much sense, so you really have to be willing to just accept the noir and go with what happens. It's still great fun, of course!

      Delete
    5. Scott, what "should"? I was happy to see Faulkner get the elbow this time. It usually works the other way - "Faulkner wrote The Big Sleep" - yeah, with some help!

      The movie, if I remember correctly, actually makes less sense than the novel because of all the bobbing and weaving to satisfy the censors.

      Delete
    6. A coda to my having brought up Leigh Brackett: Her short story Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon is as light as fiction comes, but was still a fairly funny send up of b-film and b-lit science fiction. My favorite thing in it, which I might have missed had Miguel not mentioned her work on The Long Goodbye, is that Brackett includes a tall, grey-haired character named "Altman," who basically irritable and just scowls a lot.

      Delete