Forever Damned

The amazing thing about J.-K. Huysmans' Là-Bas (1891) is how completely undated it feels. The small details of life in the late 19^th century are there, of course, but so much of it feels if not contemporary, than at least modern or recent. I was also inspired to re-read Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, which deals mostly with British and American literature, but holds a lot of cultural resonance for my reading Huysmans.

Seeking something other than his staid writerly life, where the most exciting occurrence is the un-scheduleable trial of his concierge brutally "cleaning" his apartment, Durtal is attracted to the life of a medieval serial killer and the currents of contemporary Satanism in fin de siècle Paris. As Durtal digs deeper into the story of Gilles de Rais, in order to write a definitive biography, his own life creeps nearer and nearer to real-life seductive dark mysteries. Ostensibly, Durtal is trying to understand how a man like de Rais could be drawn into medieval Satanic rites, a possible cause of the madness which enabled de Rais to slaughter hundreds of children.

And, let's be honest, the Marquis de Sade was no more than a timid bourgeois, a wretched little fantasist, in comparison with Gilles.

The tortures visited upon these children are written about explicitly, and it's no surprise that Là-Bas was censored and banned. The details are the stuff of Thomas Harris novels, or the movie Se7en. Durtal's research has him inquiring about the methods of modern Satanism, and other occult theories, and leads him, eventually, into witnessing a Black Mass.

From the very first page, Durtal is complaining about the current state of literature.

Try reading any of the latest novels a second time. What do you find? Trivial anecdotes, tidbits culled from the newspapers, nothing but scandal and demoralization[.]

There are passages in Là-Bas that could have been ripped from current CanLitCrit. Durtal complains that "the only people who buy books are society women, who can thus make or break an author." This is very much the sentiment of the anti-populist critics, who hate the sales increases of Giller award-winners, CBC Canada Reads finalists. There are tirades against schools of writing (Decadents, Naturalists) and worries that writing, and society, is too influenced by the Americans.

One of the American influences — briefly mentioned in the text of Là-Bas — is the Spiritualist movement, credited as beginning in New York with the Fox sisters and their famous rappings. Spiritualism quickly moved across the Atlantic, and while most popular in England, France could not help but be involved in a more general feeling at the end of the century that “saw civilization as being in a crisis that required a massive and total solution.” (Wikipedia) I turn to Elaine Showalter for a good synopsis of this feeling:

The ends of centuries seem not to only suggest but to intensify crises, as the 1989 bicentennial of the French Revolution and the astonishing events in Eastern Europe reminded us. History warns that after the revolution comes the terror and decadence. [...] The crises of the fin de siècle, then, are more intensely experienced, more emotionally fraught, more weighted with symbolic and historical meaning, because we invest them with the metaphors of death and rebirth that we project onto the final decades and years of a century.

Through Là-Bas we can see how certain topics do return to Western culture every hundred years or so. As Durtal's close friend, des Hermies, says:

But it's always been like that. The tail-ends of centuries all resemble each other. They are always periods of vacillation and unrest. Magic flourishes when materialism is rife. This phenomenon appears every hundred years.

and he is quite right. If we think to the1980s and 90s, there was most obviously the Satanism scare (talked about briefly in Sybil Exposed), with sensible adults convinced that everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Twisted Sister was a gateway for their children to join in with the devil.

This is also the time that the goth aesthetic reached its highest point, with dark clothing, pale skin, and religious symbolism used as heretical fashion. While the 60s had its share of dabbling in the “New Age” arts of crystals and astrology, in the 90s things took a heavier turn, with neo-pagans believing they really could affect the world around them through spell-casting. And there's always The Craft...



When I was talking about Là-Bas with a friend of mine, who is an actual professorial smart person, he said that the novel is ultimately about the dangers of getting what exactly what you want.

[N]o sooner has one secret been revealed than we lose interest in it and crave another... Just so in reading. The attempt to peer into the very core of a text, to possess once and for all its meaning, is vain--it is only ourselves that we find there, not the work itself. (Showalter, 166. Quoting Morris Zapp)

Durtal, while claiming to be "he who, when the stable-door of his sick senses opened, was happy to drive the stinking herd clamouring to get in towards the abattoir where their sinful heads might be split open by the butcher girls of love", and protesting that “the only kind of love that matters, one which is entirely intangible, a love made up of past sorrows and present regrets” is really very easily swayed into an affair with a married woman. Similarly, he is too easily titillated, very much wanting to see for himself what exactly goes on in Satanic Mass.
When reading descriptions of Satanism in Là-Bas, both contemporary to the novel and historical, I couldn't help thinking about the “real” Satanists of our time, most of whom turned out to be (and I wrote this in my annotations) malformed dorks. In a fin de siècle context, being “dark” will get you laid. Turns out, a lot of these black magicians, those who practiced the entirely laughable “sex magick” were just... kind of horny nerds. Which is fine, but it's also a let down for people who genuinely feel the pull of darkness. Durtal feels that pull, but when he sees an actual Black Mass, he's completely disgusted, and let down. Funnily enough, Cadrinal Docre, the leader of this Satanic sect, is described as not very physically attractive (though Durtal's ego has likely something to do with this description). Des Hermies, again and ever the smartest and most logical voice, agrees with my assessment of Satanism, when he remarks “I am convinced that for them the invocation of Beelzebub is only a preliminary to the carnal act.” Neither Durtal's affair, that began with letters and mysteries, nor actual Satansim can live up to what his imagination can conjure. “How right I was when I wrote that the only women you can go on loving are the ones you haven't had.” This is a human condition, of course, evidenced every time one is chased only to be quickly released after catch. We can make things as good or brutal as we need them to be in our minds, yet real life is simply a lot less exciting, and if I may, that's why we have literature.

Missed in '11: Jamrach's Menagerie

The original point of Missed in '11 was to write a lot of small posts about books I read in 2011 and wanted to write about, but for some reason or another never did. The last post in this series was 1800 words. A lot of those words were quotations, but still! I underestimated... something. So, as I begin this post I'm going to hope it's a small one^*!

I bought Jamrach's Menagerie in Paris at Shakespeare and Company. This store was very high on my Need to Do list, and it's conveniently located right across the Seine from Notre Dame. Checkcheck! I'm a bookstore supporter, and I didn't just want to go and be a tourist there; I wanted to give them some money. However, as an actual tourist, I didn't want to wander around with a bunch of heavy books all day. They had a mass market of Jamrach's Menagerie which is a perfect size for touristing. It sounded super interesting from the jacket copy and it was on the Booker short-list so I was going to read it anyway. Sold!


Hoo boy. I hadn't read anything about Jamrach's Menagerie other than it was on the shortlist, and that jacket copy. What attracted me to the novel that day was the time period and by the sounds of it there would be just the faintest hint of magical realism. Good reading for Paris! It begins this way: Jaffy Brown is kind of a Dickensian child, living not in horrific squalor, but on (to the modern, removed reader) picturesque hard-scrabble London streets. He's self-sufficient to a degree, he works odd jobs, brings home that small extra money to his single-mum. The action begins when he runs into an escaped tiger, and engages physically with that tiger in a way that shocks bystanders, one of whom is the tiger's owner, the titular Jamrach. Jaffy's life changes completely at that moment and afterwards he is employed by Jamrach. Working in the menagerie, Jaffy meets Tim, and his sister, Ishbel. The London part of this book is great, totally engaging and transportive. I could easily have read 300 pages of Jaffy's adventures in London. However, when Jaffy gets a little older he outgrows the menagerie and his London confines. Jaffy wants something, and in pursuit of the unknown something he gets on a boat.

"So much for Jaffy the child. He didn't last long, did he?"

62 pages, so much for part one.

Jaffy, Tim, and Jamrach's main exotic animal acquirer Dan Rymer, are on the hunt for a Komomdo dragon. The animal at this point in time is only legendary. Capturing and bringing one back to London — alive — will make everyone's fortune. The rest of the novel changes drastically in mood and feel. Everything becomes... I'm not going to mince words here, it gets pretty horrible. No detail of life on board a sailing vessel is missed. They find and capture a Komodo dragon, but not without horrible scenes of how these animals behave. The fate of the ship and its crew gets worse, so so much worse, and I don't want to spoil it but it's a ship, so you can probably guess. I finished the novel, but it was seriously difficult going. Sitting here with the book in my hand, I can't believe it's only 300 pages because at the time it felt like so much more. It's not that I'm squeamish or that everything I read has to be sunny and happy (and if you know me, you'll know that's not really my style anyway). Just, holy shit, this book is seriously grim.

I'm sure that first part of the book is so different from the second to make the contrast more startling, and that works. This is an incredibly well-written book, with strong characters and super-real descriptions (maybe too real). I think the problem is that it's really two books, and they don't mesh well together. If the novel began with everyone getting on the boat, with some flashback exposition, it would have worked better. Unfortunately, the reader is given one book to begin with and then has to completely change gears to understand the second. If my proposal had happened I may not have finished the book because I'd have known right away it was so very much not for me. Sneaky, perhaps, of Birch to get someone like me invested enough in pages one through 61 to hang on for the rest of the ride. Like the sailors, the reader is basically stuck going through it all. In that case, I'm a bit resentful too. I'd have been happier not reading most of this book, to be honest. It's not bad, nor offensive, but the action... ugh. Yes, that's my literary criticism: "ugh."

I'm sending Jamrach's Menagerie to my Dad, because he loves books about big ships, and those that work them. Given that, I'm sure he's read some pretty bleak things, so I'll be interested to hear his take on this book. As for me, I'm actually kind of amazed I finished it.

^*Oh, hey, 800ish. I have seriously lost the brevity thread.

The Little Lady Pt 2: Elizabeth Siddal

I was first introduced to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in a second year English lit course called "Victorian Sexuality in Poetry and Painting." It was taught by an elderly Brit who looked like he'd been there, and had decided to tell us the tale. Despite his sometimes meandering lectures (I remember he'd often veer off into talking about Marlene Dietrich), he had such amazing knowledge of the subject, and a real obvious love for the era. It was infectious. Soon, we were all in thrall with Tennyson, William Morris, Waterhouse, Burne-Jones^*, and Dante Rossetti. Especially Rossetti, because he had that fantastic macabre tale attached to him: when his wife died, he buried his unpublished poems with her, then exhumed her years later to get the poems back. It is said that when Elizabeth Siddal's casket was opened it was discovered that her hair had continued to grow after death, filling the casket with red-gold. We saw slides of Beata Beatrix^** in that class, we looked at some of Siddal's sketches and self-portraits, and we read as many of her poems as were available (few exist and are rarely anthologized). It was impossible for me not to fall for Elizabeth Siddal's tragic, romantic legend.

It's the stories and myths surrounding Siddal, and the way she's portrayed visually by male artists that draws people in. In The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal Jan Marsh does an admirable job attempting to fleece out the verifiable details of Siddal's life, of which there are surprisingly few. However, the book is less a strict biography, and more a study of the way in which biography is influenced by the times. Marsh looks at the renditions of the legend, from Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries, to modern scholarship (including her own first forays into Siddal's story). The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal is able to piece together facts about Siddal while illuminating biases that went into earlier biographies (and biographical sketches, since early on Siddal was rarely given much space or attention at all, other than references to her relationship with D.G. Rossetti). It's a bit disappointing to realise that we'll never know much, comparatively, about Siddal, and Marsh is extremely clever to take on that lack of knowledge, and how others filled the spaces, as the basis for her book, rather than attempting another biography filled with guesswork.

This is not to say that there aren't any facts to be had. One does learn a great deal about Elizabeth Siddal, reading The Legend. There aren't many books devoted to Siddal specifically, and even more modern explorations of the PRB, like Desperate Romantics, relegate Siddal to little more than girlfriend/wife. In fact, Siddal studied and produced art in her own right, as well as being muse for Rossetti, and model for Millais' famous Ophelia^† (below). The common idea that Siddal committed suicide is disputed, and her life before "discovery" by Walter Deverell is examined as much as possible. Indeed, any "fact" of Siddal's life (including the spelling of her last name!) has at least two published versions, and Marsh examines all possibilities, keeping in mind the circumstances under which they appear.

The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal is excellent reading not only for those interested in the PRB, or Siddal specifically, but as a very interesting look on how biography —especially biography of women—is created within a societal context^‡. Says Marsh in her Postscript:

The quest for the 'real Elizabeth Siddal' reveals more about the changing ideological context, and the uses to which the legend is put in the redefinitions and negotiations in the realms of gender and art. [...] [B]iography is not reincarnation, but a form of exhumation.

^*My favourite PRB work: Burne-Jones' The Depths of the Sea.
^**I saw a Beata Beatrix in Chicago a couple years ago and almost wept. I suppose this sounds dramatic, but I did get a great lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. Art, AMIRITE?
^†The painting of Ophelia, prior to her taking up with Rossetti, gave rise to another often told story about Siddal, who was painted while floating in a bathtub of freezing water, while Millais painted her. "As it was now winter, he placed oil lamps under the tub to warm the water, but was so intent on his work that he allowed them to go out. As a result, Siddal caught a severe cold, and her father later sent Millais a letter demanding £50 for medical expenses. According to Millais' son, he eventually accepted a lower sum"
^‡And now I feel like I need to re-read The Biographer's Tale.

Realism Rears Its Ugly Head

One of my nebulous New Year's resolutions was to blog more. Clearly, that didn't happen. Not that I haven't been reading. Here's a bit of a follow-up to my last post, though it's not nearly as well thought-out. To be honest, A Line of Beauty deserves a lot more space than I give it here, and I probably could have done far, far more with it. However, I'm clearly a lazy blogger, and I'm sure my audience of six isn't waiting with baited breath for the next revolution in critical thinking to show up on this page.

* * *


A friend of mine^*, who just happens to be a PhD candidate in Victorian Literature, and I were discussing my last post over email, and he pointed out that the Victorians had a "fetish for Realism." The reason Hardy was singled out, and critisized for his contrivances, was that they were more in the Romantic tradition. Which brings me nicely to The Line of Beauty, a book that also deals with class considerations in heavily class-conscious Thatcherite Britain. Nick, our protagonist, comes from middle-class stock, well outside London. He went onto Oxford and met the sons of the upper class, to whom he'd be attached for several years after. While his class gaffs sometimes set him apart (example: thinking a maid is the lady of the house), and his status as The Lodger (or one who "fills out the numbers at dinner") is never far from the surface, the outsider status really revolves around his homosexuality.

He begins the novel living in the ritzy house of a prominent MP, made possible by the friendship of the MP's son, Toby. Later on, he begins a long-term love affair with an heir to a grocery-chain fortune, Wani, whom he also knew from school. While Nick's sexuality is an open secret, Wani maintains a fiancé, until his AIDs infection progresses so far as so be undeniable.

Line of Beauty takes the opposite tack from Run in dealing with class
mingling, as it lacks Romantic tricks, and sticks firmly in realism. My Vic Lit pal mentioned that we still carry some of that Victorian sensibility with us, and many people feel that "capital 'L' Literature" must still be realistic to be lauded. He also points out that even now, there's still a bit of

lingering misogyny toward women as authors. Realism, as an aesthetic, has its roots in the 18th century when male authors made a case for the literary value of their work over the romances written by women; the novel, as a form, was posited in opposition to feminine, un-literary writing.

It's definitely something for me to chew over, regarding my thesis on class-consciousness in both the contemporary and Victorian novel, but I think there's space for both schools of writing to work within my theoretical framework.

Or I'll just pretend all this never happened.

Hey!
Look over there!
SHINY!
*shifty eye*

The Line of Beauty won the 2004 Booker Prize.


* * *

I'm editing a manuscript for a friend of mine at the moment^**. I forgot how much fun it is to really get into an edit. I'm not an editor, but like 90% of the people who graduated with an English degree, I always wanted to be. It's combination substantive/copy edit, and my brain is working harder than it's had to in a really, really long time. For which I'm very grateful. I'm sure she thinks I'm doing her a favour, but it really is the other way around.


^*Hopefully he won't mind me quoting him. He's a smart cookie; I value his opinion, and appreciate his help.
^**Like most people, I'm better at noticing others' mistakes.

Reviews of Reviews pt 2

When I was in University I took a Victorian novel class. In that class we were assigned the Broadview^* edition of Hardy's Tess of the d’Urbervilles^**, which made mention of critics' struggles with Hardy's reliance on coincidence. To quote Walter Allen (as quoted in that edition):

"[Modern critics] have found fault with [Hardy's] extensive exploration of coincidence. [...] [The character's] creator cannot convince us that the Immanent Will, and not Thomas Hardy, is responsible."

Having just recently finished Jane Eyre I took issue with this critique. Shouldn't Brontë have been maligned for the same reasons? Surely the madwoman in the attic, the brother of said woman who shows up to ruin Jane and Rochester's wedding, the discovery of cousins, and the windfall of cash through Uncle John strains the reader's suspension of disbelief far more than the story Tess? I wrote a big ol' undergrad paper on the comparison of the two, coming down hard on Brontë, and giving a big thumbs up to Hardy.

I thought of these things as I read Steven W. Beattie's review of Run some months ago. Beattie's main criticism of Run is also the strain on credulity.

The degree of sympathy a reader will have for Patchett's novel will depend upon the degree to which that reader is able to accept the essentially contrived nature of the novel's plot. Although there are plenty of coincidences in Run, any one of these in itself would not be enough to damn the novel; coincidence is a part of life, after all, why should it not also be a part of fiction? But the sheer number of implausibilities begin to add up after a while, and, in aggregate, they can't help but take a toll on a reader's willingness to suspend disbelief.

While I agree that Patchett employs many "coincidences and contrivances" to propel her narrative, I didn't find myself questioning those tactics, nor did they seem too overt. Like in Tess, I just went with it, without questioning, and it worked for me. Unlike my experience reading Jane Eyre, were I kept talking back to the book, saying "Oh come on!" or uttering guttural sounds like "ugh," Run was smooth sailing, uninterrupted by jarring disconnects from reality (yes, even when Patchett employs a ghost to tell part of the story).

Taking these three books together, I did find some interesting similarities.
Run is set up like a lot of Victorian novels, in that there's a class-mingling -- or class-conflict -- at the centre of the book, which is the push for the narrative. Tess was a farm girl, raped by a member of the local gentry. Governess Jane falls for the rich Rochester. Tip and Teddy, in Run, are the adopted black sons of the former mayor of Boston, who were given up by a poor, single-mother. Perhaps in Victorian times, when the classes really didn't mingle that much (save for the home owner dealing with "the help"), there needed to be a large narrative coincidence to bring the economically disparate classes together. Run too, needs to challenge the reader with coincidence, in order to have the classes co-mingle. The premise of the novel, that the white mayor of an American city would adopt two black children, is (sadly) incredible to begin with. If the reader is to accept that, then what follows shouldn't be taken as surprising, or tough to believe. Rather, Run is a novel in which anything can happen, because the strangest thing already has. And it's a bit startling to realise that even in the 21^st century, a novel about class, and class-systems, would have to use the same "tricks" the Victorians did, to make the narrative move forward. Which leads me to believe that we haven't come very far at all: the class-war exists in North America now as much as it did in Victorian England.

Beattie again:

And when a ghost appears to a key character in order to reveal yet another, supposedly ironic character relationship, all pretense to plausibility disintegrates[...]

If you take this in the context of Run being a kind of Victorian novel, the ghost actually makes perfect sense, since ghosts are a pretty standard Victorian/Gothic element. One need only think of Dickens' A Christmas Carol to see how ghosts tell the stories that the "mortals" in a book can't.

I enjoyed Run on first read, and have to thank Beattie for making me look a lot closer at a novel that I first just thought of as a good read. Now, I look at Run as a revival of a Victorian style of writing, that modern critics do indeed have a difficult time accepting. However, when it's done well, as it is with Tess and Run, the style has a lot to say about how classes, even now, simply stick to their own. A novel that has classes co-existing on such an intimate level strains the readers' suspension of disbelief, not because such novels rely too heavily on coincidence (though they do employ it), but because such things are still so very uncommon. The author creates implausible situations and solutions throughout to highlight the fact that the narrative situation is so odd in the first place.

Only in a strange world, where the normal does not apply, can the abnormal happen.


^*I went to Uni in Calgary, where Broadview is based. As such, a lot of the textbooks we used were Broadview editions, and several of the editors of such books were profs at the U of C. I can't say enough good things about this publisher. They are beautiful editions of books, that consider the people using them: ie the margins are wide enough to write in, the paper is solid enough to write on, and the footnotes are at the end of the page not the end of the book. All good things for students! I highly recommend picking up a Broadview edition of a classic, if you're in the market for one. You won't be sorry.
^**For the record, when asked, I always cite Tess as my "favourite" book.