A parody, an empty show - Pushkin opens his Byron

We all enjoy a fiction that attacks fiction don’t we?  Madame Bovary and Don Quixote and so on.  Eugene Onegin belongs on the list.  Like the Cervantes novel, Pushkin’s poem both attacks and rehabilitates.

The title character, the bored dandy, is not much of a reader.  The quotation I used yesterday, about how books were dullness, deceit and raving, ends with Onegin decorating his bookshelves “in taffeta of mourning black” (One: XLIV, Johnston).  Books are dead.  Later we discover that Onegin does read, but narrowly – Lord Byron, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.  He seems to only like books in which he identifies with the main character.  Literature as a mirror.

Near the end of the novel Onegin turns to books to escape from heartache – “Gibbon and Rousseau, Manzoni and Chamfort…  and at times even a Russian” (Eight: XXXV, Johnston).  Not surprisingly, none of this works.  It does serve to remind me of one of the obstacles facing the reader of Eugene Onegin, a reason Nabokov wrote a thousand pages of commentary, why the Penguin edition still has over a hundred, one page of notes per two pages of text.  Of course I have read all of those authors (the ones I have not read I hid in the ellipses), and of course you have read them.  But some unintended distance is introduced.  Or so I guess.  This never seems to bother the Janeites.

The heroine’s reading is used more ingeniously.  Young, innocent Tatyana Larin seems to be as corrupted by literature as Emma Roualt when the novel begins, although her models are more elevated.  The perfect man is the title character of Samuel Richardson’s endless Sir Charles Grandison (1753), the perfect heroine the title character of Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761).

From early on she loved romances,
they were her only food… and so
she fell in love with all the fancies
of Richardson and Rousseau.
Her father, kindly, open-hearted,
but dwelling in an age departed,
could see no harm in books; himself
he never took one from the shelf,
thought them a pointless peccadillo;
and cared not what his daughter kept
by way of secret tome that slept
until the dawn beneath her pillow,
His wife, just like Tatyana, had
on Richardson gone raving mad.  (Two: XXIX, Johnston, ellipses in original)

The latter experience is common for readers of Grandison.

Tatyana is not completely corrupted, though, since it turns out she has not read Byron or Melmoth or similar books – too naughty, I suppose.  She only reads them after she has fallen in love with her idealized Onegin, once he leaves his estate after his stupid duel (Sir Charles Grandison refuses to duel).  She in fact reads Onegin’s books, in Onegin’s library (“Lord Byron’s portrait on the wall”).  She reads not just the books but Onegin’s marginal notes, even noting passages “where a sharp nail has made a dent.”  She reads, in other words, not to find herself but to find Onegin, and what does she find?

Just an apparition,
a shadow, null and meaningless,
a Muscovite in Harold’s dress,
a modish second-hand edition,
a glossary of smart argot …
a parody, an empty show?  (Seven: XXIV, Johnston, ellipses in original).

Fiction is both cause and cure.  Onegin just mimics his fictional models.  Tatyana critiques them.  He drifts, she matures.

Thomas Carlyle has a line in Sartor Resartus that always makes me laugh – “Close thy Byron; open they Goethe.”  Pushkin proves Carlyle wrong.  Tatyana finds wisdom by opening someone else’s Byron.

George Meredith mocks Jane Austen's favorite novel - The clean-linen of her morality was spotless as his

The key to The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is its deliberate artificiality.  George Meredith’s conception of the novel is unusual.  He fits patterns onto the novel in peculiar ways.  The lead character of The Egoist, which came twenty years Ordeal, is actually named Willoughby Pattern.  He is so named because the motif of willow pattern china runs through the novel, providing an arbitrary structure independent from the action.  It is an advanced technique.

Oh, it is so tempting to hash out the whole thread of eighteenth century literature that runs through The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, one of the novel’s substitutes for china patterns.  I mentioned the parodies of eighteenth century pedagogy, like Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762).  I mentioned that there is a character actually called the Eighteenth Century (“The Eighteenth Century wondered whether she should live to see another birthday,” Vol. II, Ch. 4).

Most amazing is the thoroughgoing parody, or even travesty, of the novels of Samuel Richardson, particularly of Jane Austen’s favorite novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753), Richardson’s enormously long attempt to portray the ideal man after creating one of English literature’s greatest villains in his previous novel, Clarissa.  Richard the Knight, the Hero, to use Meredith’s epithets, is meant by his father to be another ideal man.  Since Meredith does not believe in perfection, the plan goes topsy turvy.

Sir Charles, for example, demonstrates his virtue by refusing to fight a duel, while Feverel actively incites a duel.  Sir Charles and his correspondents spend what must end up being hundreds of pages discussing in detail whether he can marry a Catholic.  Richard Feverel’s true love is, it turns out, Catholic, but since they are young and in haste the issue is simply brushed aside.   Both heroes make plans to reform prostitutes – guess which one succeeds?

You think I am making this up, but look in Book II, Chapter 3, where we meet a mother with some daughters who might be suitable for Richard Feverel.  She is:

Mrs. Caroline Grandison, said to be a legitimate descendant of the great Sir Charles: a lady who, in propriety of demeanour and pious manners, was the petticoated image of her admirable ancestor.  The clean-linen of her morality was spotless as his.  As nearly she neighboured Perfection, and knew it as well.  Let us hope that her History will some day be written, and the balance restored in Literature which it was her pride to have established for her sex in Life.

Mrs. Grandison ensures the virtues of her eight daughters by dosing them with patent medicine and enforcing an exercise regime that features “swing-poles, and stride-poles, and newly invented instruments for bringing out special virtues: an instrument for the lungs: an instrument for the liver: one for the arms and thighs: one for the wrists: the whole for the promotion of the Christian accomplishments.”

Any time the Grandison family appears, all too infrequently, the comedy is excellent.  The gag culminates in a scene with the youngest daughter Carola, a thirteen year-old who wishes she were a boy and would rather be known as Carl (“That’s the German for Charles”).  Another rarity in Victorian novels.

So this is one complex but highly artificial strand that runs through the whole book.  One more tomorrow, and that will be enough suffering.

A pretty Scripture thing - let's stand on a chair and look at the prints in The Mill on the Floss

A week or two ago I borrowed an out of context line from The Mill on the Floss (1860) for my own malign purposes. Young Maggie Tulliver, a great reader, is trying to convince Luke the miller, her father's employee, of the value of books. She thinks he might enjoy the illustrated Pug's Tour of Europe:

"'There are the Dutchmen, very fat, and smoking, you know, and one sitting on a barrel.'

'Nay, Miss, I'n no opinion o' Dutchmen. There ben't much good i'knowin' about them.'

'But they're our fellow-creatures, Luke; we ought to know about our fellow-creatures.'

'Not much o' fellow-creaturs, I think, Miss; all I know--my old master, as war a knowin' man, used to say, says he, 'If e'er I sow my wheat wi'out brinin', I'm a Dutchman,' says he; an' that war as much as to say as a Dutchman war a fool, or next door. Nay, nay, I aren't goin' to bother mysen about Dutchmen. There's fools enoo, an' rogues enoo, wi'out lookin' i' books for 'em.'" (I.IV.)

Luke also rejects the "elephants and kangaroos, and the civet-cat, and the sunfish" found in Animated Nature. This is all good fun, a nice foil for the boundlessly curious and imaginative child Maggie.

Eliot extends the joke when Luke invites Maggie back to his house to visit his wife and eat bread and treacle. Maggie "stood on a chair to look at a remarkable series of pictures representing the Prodigal Son in the costume of Sir Charles Grandison, except that, as might have been expected from his defective moral character, he had not, like that accomplished hero, the taste and strength of mind to dispense with a wig."

I believe that the Prodigal Son is some combination of fool and rogue, and that his story is to be found in a book, so it turns out that Luke is not as free from the influence of books as he believes. Could the story actually be from The Gospel of Luke? Of course it is (15:11-32). Good one, George Eliot.

Next joke: over the course of the novel, Maggie is going to turn out to be a kind of Prodigal Daughter, so Eliot's setting up that theme here. But she's going to be an extraordinarily virtuous, unusually non-prodigious prodigal. That explains the otherwise bizarre insertion by the narrator of Sir Charles Grandison into the description, a character as far from the Prodigal Son as can be imagined.

Everyone's read Sir Charles Grandison, so I can just - what's that? No? Grandison is Samuel Richardson's Ideal Man, created as a penance for making Clarissa's diabolical Lovelace too interesting. There's a letter of Jane Austen's in which she also singles out the detail of the wig - Sir Charles, you see, wears his own long, flowing hair, a telling detail that shows his confidence, freedom from mindless convention, and possibly his freedom from venereal disease. Maggie's a lot closer to Richardson's hero than to the Prodigal, except she's not such a dull stick. I'm just saying, if Eliot just wanted to show that the Biblical characters in the pictures were wearing 18th century clothes, she could have used Tom Jones or Roderick Random, who were prodigal and then some.

A few chapters later, Maggie investigates another set of prints, at her Uncle Pullet's house. Maggie becomes "fascinated, as usual, by a print of Ulysses and Nausicaa, which uncle Pullet had bought as a 'pretty Scripture thing'" (I.IX.) Now that's just mean. Poor, dumb Uncle Pullet. Which Bible story do you think he thinks it is? Girl doing laundry meets naked man on beach - I have no idea.

I think I'll spend a couple more days rooting through The Mill on the Floss, looking at the pictures.

The taste for story - "Too - much - goin' - on!"

Back to that James Wood interview for a minute, and "the essential juvenility of plot." He said it, not me! Wood immediately admits that he doesn't really mean it anyway, he's exaggerating for effect.

Wood is not really making an argument here. He's just stating a preference, a preference for "fiction in which not a lot happens in obvious ways." It's a preference I share - give me Richardson over Fielding, Austen over Scott. Chekhov, Proust, Beckett. Give me Malone Dies (plot summary: Malone dies).

There's a distinction I should make between story and incident. Everyone wants a strong story. It's the taste for incident that really matters. Clarissa has only three or four major incidents, that, over the course of 200 pages, might make for a taut thriller. Over the actual 2,000 or so pages, they become secondary. Or look at Proust - a fair part of "Combray" is devoted to details about how the narrator falls asleep, and the climax is when our young hero runs off to say farewell to his favorite hawthorn bush.* Dumas (or Hugo, or Dickens), fills his long books with much more incident. A lot more just happens, even if the basic story is not much more complex.

The quote in the title is something meine Frau heard at a showing of the remake of Shaft. The dashes should be read as pauses, the inflection should be increasing - land hard on the last word. It's a brilliant piece of literary criticism. Incident is often mistaken for story, even by professional writers. A good action movie has a simple, possibly even mindless plot, but complicated episodes. Writers, like the Shafters, often get this wrong. We want fewer plot twists, but more cool incidents.

The taste for incident is sometimes described as immature (action movies, video games). We're supposed to outgrow it, just as we're supposed to cultivate or somehow acquire a taste for sophistication in music. Honestly, is this anything but snobbery? The use of incident can be extremely subtle. Orlando Furioso is almost nothing but incidents, piled up to the moon, ingeniously woven together. Ovid's Metamorphoses works similarly - the fragments and stories are individually brilliant, but the transitions are marvels.

My preferences are ceteris paribus. I prefer less to more, all else equal, but with the great writers, all else is never equal. Rabelais, Cervantes, Byron, Waugh - their wonderful books are bursting with activity. Now I don't know what to think. Maybe I like it all. Save that thought for tomorrow.

Anyway, this has to influence how I write about stories. If I don't put a high value on story, then I won't be as thoughtful about revealing surprises as I perhaps should. Maybe writing this out will remind me to be more careful. Probably not. De gustibus non disputandum est. Nonsense, we dispute other people's tastes all the time. But how often do we argue with our own?

* The most pathetic scene in all of literature? Marcel gives the hawthorn a big hug, tearing up his little suit and hat. What a great book.