The taste that loves ornament, however bad - interior decoration in North and South, with a digression on the Indian shawl

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. (Vladimir Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Lectures on Literature)

I’m going to collect one of North and South’s trifles.  It is a particularly pleasant one to fondle, made of real Indian silk, with a “soft feel” and “brilliant colors,” or so I am told in the first chapter, when the Indian shawl is introduced.  In a mildly comic scene, our heroine Margaret is buried in shawls, “laden with shawls, and snuffing up their spicy Eastern smell.”  She seems to be doing a bit of fondling herself.  Anyone who has one is “a lucky girl.”  They are “very perfect things of their kind.”

At this point, the shawls serve two purposes:  this one detail, this excess of shawls, conveys the scope of the wealth of Margaret’s London relatives, and its source in Indian ventures; and Margaret’s modeling of the shawls gives Gaskell her first excuse to describe her protagonist to the reader.  A few pages later, the shawls are briefly mentioned again.  Margaret’s suitor, Henry Lennox, vulgarly admires their monetary value.

Difficult circumstances force Margaret to an industrial city, where her own Indian shawl, apparently a gift  from her aunt’s heap, takes on a personal meaning.  It is one of her few luxuries.  She is now the poor gentlewoman with the unusually nice shawl, something the poor children like to touch.

If the shawl is so important, it must be involved in the romantic plot.  Let’s see, when does Margaret meet Thornton?  Chapter 7:

Her dress was very plain: a close straw bonnet of the best material and shape, trimmed with white ribbon; a dark silk gown, without any trimming or flounce; a large Indian shawl, which hung about her in long heavy folds, and which she wore as an empress wears her drapery.

We’re seeing Margaret through Thornton’s eyes.  He is the no-nonsense self-made man of business, but his response to the shawl is poetic, entirely different than that of Henry Lennox.

I could continue with the shawl, but at this exact point in the novel, the shawl theme intersects with the interior decoration theme.  Margaret has just discovered that, in the industrial town, apartments are not only expensive but decorated in the worst possible taste.

She had never come fairly in contact with the taste that loves ornament, however bad, more than the plainness and simplicity which are of themselves the framework of elegance.

Hey, is that a dig at me?  I love ornament in fiction, although I like to pretend that I only like good ornament.

Every dwelling in the novel is at some point described in terms of the taste of its décor.  Taste is a signifier of – well, it depends on who is looking.  Henry Lennox, suitor #1, seeing the tasteful but faded carpets and curtains of Margaret and her family in Chapter 3 interprets them economically (the family is poorer than he had thought), just as he did the shawl, two chapters earlier.  Thornton, in the same situation (Ch. 10), notices all sorts of specific objects and intuitively understands them as an extension of Margaret herself, even though he barely knows her.  He also contrasts them with the sterile, uncomfortable (and, although he does not know it, tasteless) decoration of his own home.

Again, I could keep going, but will not.  The only point I really want to make is, this is skilled, controlled writing, yes?  Dang good.  North and South is rarely written along these principles.  It could have been.  Gaskell knew how to do it.

but . . . one has never been able to find out what--satin--hat explodes - Stéphane Mallarmé is kinda hard to decipher

When I claimed that Samuel Butler, in Erewhon, or Anatole France in Penguin Island* are hard to pin down, a little hard to understand, what I mean is that they are dedicated ironists, committed to not quite saying exactly what they mean.  It can be difficult to understand their stance, or tell when they are joking or when they are merely joking (they are always joking).

I had been reading Stéphane Mallarmé alongside Butler and France, as if to remind myself what true difficulty looks like.  Mallarmé challenges me to decipher individual sentences, or the use of specific words, words I understand in non-Mallarméan texts.  And that’s in his prose that follows the usual rules of punctuation and paragraphing.  What to do with this:

An excerpt from The Book, is what that is, from the 2001 Mallarmé in Prose, New Directions, pp 132-3.  This particular piece is translated by Richard Sieburth, a champion of the more baffling side of Mallarmé.  The title of this post can be found in the lower right-hand corner.  Click to enlarge, I hope.

Mallarmé is constructing a text in a way that creates multiple meanings.  The sentences can be read across, or down, or I can follow the lines.  I can insert or omit phrases.  The meaning of any particular section remains obscure, and the layering of possibilities only adds to my confusion.  The effect overwhelms the sense.  I see that Sieburth has written an article on this text – on the whole thing, 72 manuscript sheets – titled “Discard or Masterpiece? Mallarmé’s Le Livre.”

The only other time I have written about Mallarmé, I did the same thing I am doing here, scanning pages of the wildest things I could find.  Mallarmé’s texts mostly do not look like this.  His poems look like sonnets, his fashion writing looks like fashion writing.  The sense is rarely much clearer, though.

Mallarmé’s writing – his prose as much as his verse – is essentially musical, with words chosen for their sound:

Whereas there was, when language reigned, a first attunement to the origin, in order for an august sense to be produced: in Verse, the dispenser and organizer of pages, master of the book.  Visibly, whether it appears in the integrality among the margins and blanks, or dissimulates itself, call it Prose, but it’s still there if there’s any secret pursuit of music within the storehouse of Discourse.  (“Displays,” Divagations, 1897, tr. Barbara Johnson)

The “secret pursuit of music” – in English, I have to take that on faith.  Or, I can mouth the French here (bottom paragraph), and continue to scratch my poor head.

I mentioned the fashion writing, yes?  Mallarmé wrote and published several issues of a fasion magazine, La Dernière Mode (The Latest Fashion) using a number of pseudonyms – Margeurite de Ponty, Miss Satin, A Reader from Alsace – in which he advises that the bustle is dead, but cameos are coming back into fashion, and bicycle pants should be partly covered by short skirts – “such a dazzle melts me, knocks me over, and pierces me” (M. in Prose, p. 95).  He recommends perfumed soaps, by brand, and “the deliciously-named product Snow Cream.”  He provides a recipe for mulligatawny, and ideas for the decoration of Christmas trees that would meet the approval of Martha Stewart (gilded walnuts!).

This glorious nonsense is drawn from the few pages of La Dernière Mode translated in Mallarmé in Prose.  Why the whole thing, every issue, has not been translated is beyond me.  I am not entirely sure of Mallarmé’s stance about fabrics and perfumes and top hats, either, but if I had to take my own stand, I would say that he means it, every word.

* Next week is Anatole France week!  It is as if I am determined drive off my readers.  Come back, come back!  France is not so bad!