Tolkien: Does He Matter?

Joseph at Ironical Coincidings published this post the other day, discussing what it means to "Inherit Tolkien". He pointed out that he's moved away in some respects from his youthful affiliation with Tolkien, and mentioned towards the end that I seemed to have done likewise, asking for my input on what I had done with the old, pipe-smoking, armchair-loving linguist. It's a question that I found very interesting; partly because Joseph seemed to be suggesting that the two options for what to do with him are either to relegate him to the children's bookshelf (not something I'd think appropriate) or to interpret him in a way compatible with modernity. This second possibility could be read two ways: either it means finding a justification for Tolkien's work within the aesthetic criteria of literary modernism (in which case, I think one would need to look for a third solution), or showing that Tolkien was in fact responding to concerns of the modern world, though he found it necessary to move into the realm of fantasy to formulate his response. It's that latter possibility that I agree with, to some extent. It does leave out part of the truth: Tolkien started the story primarily as a way to indulge his hobby of language-creation, not so much to "send a message" or "address" anything; that came along naturally when he started to craft the story.

Anyway, the question is pertinent also to this blog in the sense that, as Joseph points out, it was started with Tolkien and his friends as the primary inspiration: just look at its name. So I'm copying the response I posted on his blog and reproducing it here. Despite the fact that it's a bit jumbled at times, it does, I think, give a bit of insight into how Tolkien can still be an "inspiration" years after discussion of his work fell by the wayside.

See Joseph's second post in the series for background for my occasional references to Gene Wolfe.

My attempt at an answer:

It’s interesting that you bring this up when you do, because I had begun to notice how far I’d moved from the original focus of my blog about two months ago. Accordingly, the updated “look” of the site dropped the Tolkien photo, which seemed a bit out of keeping with the content, and replaced it with a non-author specific photo: just a bunch of bookshelves from the tiny used bookstore in my hometown. Even the place where that photo was taken reflects my shift in focus…you mention T.S. Eliot as having supplanted Tolkien in my consciousness, which in a literary-critical sense is true, but even my initially strictly-New-Critical focus on literature has expanded to be more like cultural criticism than anything else. Not that I like the way most cultural criticism is done, but I was getting rather sick of thinking about literature in a vacuum, which (pure) New Criticism would have you do.

Questions about literature in my blog have been overshadowed by questions about the relationship between geographical places, their history, the culture of the people there, and in turn the relationship between the sum of those aspects and the sum of those found in completely different geographical areas. I’m beginning–and this is kind of natural, given that I’m over here studying “Belgian” literature and finding that the first question that needs to be asked is “Is there a Belgian literature?” Or even, “Is there any such thing, really, as a Belgian?”

When considering this shift, I'm not sure myself if it’s permanent, or simply a stage informed by my previous ideas about literature. But whether a permanent shift or a temporary stage, the fact that it’s “informed” by my earlier ideas is unquestionable. Which brings me back to Tolkien.

I, like you, was introduced to Tolkien at an early age: my dad read us the Hobbit when I was five; I had finished the trilogy by the time I was about eight. And I’m indebted to the fellow on several levels. For one thing, finishing the trilogy taught me that I could read “grown-up” literature. Without having crossed that threshold chez Tolkien, I wouldn’t have read Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, or Bleak House, or Crime and Punishment, or any of the other classics I devoured well before high school. So in a sense, reading “serious literature” had its roots in Tolkien, though even that far back it was fairly obvious that Tolkien wasn’t “serious” in the sense that a lot of that other literature was. I did consider him an important literary figure, but that was more for his translations of Beowulf and Sir Gawain, his linguistic skills, and his encouragement of Nordic mythology–one reason I’d object to what Wolfe says is that I think Tolkien considered himself an “heir” of Dante only in the sense that he was Catholic–aesthetically, it was always the Beowulf-type story that attracted him.

But honestly, I’m not entirely ready to put Tolkien on trial to see whether his work can be called “great literature”. I always conceived of it as doing something very consciously different than the mainstream of literature, and I don’t mind that. He wasn’t a writer, primarily; not friends with Hemingway or Woolf or any of those. He was just a linguist who could tell a darn good story. Whatever literary critics will make of Tolkien, the fact remains that he is much more widely and passionately read than Woolf or Faulkner or Hemingway. As great and innovative as all of them are, they are difficult to read. Maybe not for an English major, who’s accustomed to reading difficult things, but honestly, for the average person, Faulkner or Woolf are not going to be fun, rewarding reads. Now, I know that Eliot can be accused of this excessive difficulty as well (and the accusation is true to an extent), but I’m 100% in agreement with his essays calling for a literature that’s more accessible to the public (“Marie Lloyd” is one I can think of off the top of my head).

Tolkien is accessible to the public. Tolkien tells a good story. Tolkien also in my view, for what it’s worth, is not so much trying to return to the Middle Ages, as Gene Wolfe suggests, as he is using the setting to make his emphasis on heroism, sacrifice, and redemptive suffering seem natural. He was aware enough of his time to understand that after WWI, a turn to fantasy was the only way to make “discredited” heroic virtue real again. That might not get him into the anthologies, but that hardly discredits his work as juvenile, in my opinion.

Regarding Tolkien’s influence on me. I would say that he’s neither been relegated to the children’s bookshelf, for the reasons above, nor do I find it necessary to map his solutions more closely to modernity than I’ve already done. He’s not offering a “modern” point of view; he’s offering a timeless solution to some of the deepest questions plaguing modern man…and if he doesn’t treat the modernist question of “well, how can we tell what’s real anyway”….well, he’s careful enough to make it all fiction, which actually makes it much more realistic than presenting the same ideas in a realist medium. (Although, it would admittedly be interesting to look more closely at the use of mythical models by Eliot, Joyce, Northrop Frye, etc, though that’s not the most fashionable thing to do in lit crit just now.)

What I’ve taken from Tolkien is a very basic framework for understanding what literature is and what sorts of problems the post-enlightenment, post-world wars world is facing. Sure, it’s a framework that’s not purely Tolkienian, given how often its been modified by other writers, and the fact that Tolkien certainly was not all I read when I started my blog at seventeen. But here are some of its most important points:

A.) Mythical resonances make great literature. You don’t need everything to be fantasy or theology, talking about gods or God, to find these. Look at the lighthouse in Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”; the symbol of the “accursed family” in Faulkner; the return to Greek mythology around WWII in France. You need things in literature that resonate with meaning for more than just the author. Successful literature can’t be wholly subjective; it’s got to call on images and master-plots and characters that the audience can identify with. The difference between fantasy and “realism” is actually rather blurred here: in some ways, fantasy seems to be different mostly in its willingness to forefront the symbol or master-plot (and then jettison “realism” altogether to make that move more palatable to the modern audience) while the realists seek to camouflage the same things so that they do not strike us as unrealistic.

B.) Culture matters. Friendship matters. Two things to which our society pays extravagant lip-service, but which it really doesn’t understand. What does it mean to be “rooted” in a place? What does it mean to be a friend? Those are questions of which I first became aware through Tolkien’s work, and they are still very explicitly at the center of my writing, both on the blog and off.

C.) Good literature is a good story. The biggest reason that the contemporary lit crit circles put me in such a state of ennui just now is simply that they all seem to have forgotten this. And since growing up on Tolkien (and Dickens and Austen, and the Brontes and Lewis and so forth) I can’t forget it. It’s why, even now, I hold myself to the rule of “no criticism on the first reading” unless it’s a school text and I’m forced to do so. I see absolutely no reason why one should go on about the aesthetic merits of a text unless one has first shown that the story is excellent. And if the story is excellent, the text is worth something, in my opinion. Maybe it’s not the most innovative of books; maybe the characters (as in Dickens) are stock figures; maybe the line of reasoning behind some of the Bronte’s plots is occasionally fragile. But they’re all darn good stories. You can figure out that the modernists are good storytellers after you’ve read a lot of their work and understand the type of story they’re trying to tell. Appreciation of their aesthetic innovations, comes however, for me at least, only after I appreciate the story. The reason Tolkien is so much more popular than the modernists is evident though: he tells a fantastic story that does not rely so heavily on the reader’s capacity to sit down, struggle through 200 difficult pages, go back, read it again, and then finally appreciate it. Aesthetically innovative or not, excessively “fantastical” or not, his books are admirable in that respect at least.

Peter Walsh

Because I sadly won't be able to talk about this rather excellent character in my final essay. Time constraints in the presentation and all that.

Of the novel's central figures, Peter Walsh is the most directly related to Clarissa herself; he is in fact one of her former suitors, and has essentially wasted his life in a restless quest to recover in other women what he lost through her rejection. He is treated with a good deal more sympathy than the narrative is willing to grant Bradshaw, yet in some senses, he is the physician's most obvious counterpart,with his attitude similar in kind, if not in degree, to his. He is to Clarissa, “dear Peter,” and to the reader he is a man whose honesty regarding his own weaknesses—women and sentimentality—makes him a rather charming figure. All the same, he has several unsettling habits—such as that of stalking women down city streets. Admittedly he does this with no harmful intent. Upon noting that the unknown young woman passing him by is “extraordinarily attractive,” he casually pursues down the street, and pursues her mentally by filling out an imaginative picture of her (210). The picture is harmless enough: he simply imagines that he might invite her to “come and have an ice,” that she would answer, “perfectly simply, Oh yes” (211). Yet though his physical pursuit comes to an uneventful end when she opens the door of her lodgings and walks in, his mental pursuit locks her into an ideal that exists entirely within his own imagination. He conceives of himself as a “romantic buccaneer”; yet his adventure is only this banal response to experience that attempts to capture it in his imagination and to redefine it in terms that he has preordained: “young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting” (211).

A bit of Bradshawian aggression though this may seem, Peter's project ends up being harmless, and within the next four paragraphs Peter dismisses it as a bit of “fun.” “One makes up the better part of life, he [thinks]. . .creating an exquisite amusement” from experience, but nothing more (212). Something compels him to realize the insufficiency of this self-imposing approach to the world, and one is led to believe that this may be in part due to Clarissa herself; she interrupts his thoughts here with her injunction to “remember my party” (212), and dominates his consciousness throughout the novel. He is inclined to pursue and to layer his ideal order over the independent nature of those outside him; he is disposed to make them, at least as they appear to his consciousness, dependent on him for their definition. Yet his love for Clarissa, we sense, has raised the bar for this ideal too high. This girl is not Clarissa. Neither is his first, hastily-married wife. Even Daisy, his object of infatuation at the time this story takes place, fades into the background when he returns from India to Clarissa's London. “All this [making things up] one could never share,” he realizes (212). Clarissa's independent existence constantly returns to “smash to atoms” every attempt to concoct an artificial order out of the elements of experience (212).

Peter is not, however, simply a threat rendered harmless by the tempering effect of his memory of Clarissa. By the end of the novel he has become a visionary who, in sharp contrast to both Septimus and Bradshaw, affirms being-as-it-is. The moment when the threat of his potential destructiveness finally disappears is that when he is able to open himself up to enjoyment of life as it is, not as he would like it to be. He is at last able to let go of his pain at Clarissa's rejection and to accept her—and by extension her husband and way of life—as she is: by the end his life has been justified through this reorientation of perspective as one truly worth living despite his failures as an Indian official or in romance. Towards the end of the climactic party, a brief interaction between Peter and his old friend, Sally Seton, highlights the change that has occurred in his disposition that allows him these visionary moments. “Living in the world as she did,” the narrative comments, Sally “had an insatiable curiosity to know who people were”; accordingly she glances around the room, analyzing and caricaturing in a manner reminiscent of Peter's earlier aggressive categorization of people within his own subjective schema. “Clarissa was at heart a snob,” she judges, and then pronounces with assurance that “Clarissa had cared for [Peter] more than she had ever cared for Richard” (337, 339). In his earlier visit, Peter had similarly found that Clarissa “talked nonsense”and that she and her husband led a banal existence centered around “the most appalling bores in Europe”; moreover, the “truth” as he then saw it was indeed that “now [Clarissa] was in love with him” (235, 235). Yet now he admits in response to Sally's declarations that “he had not found life simple” (338). Richard Dalloway may indeed come off as a dull fellow, but Peter can now see more in him: the man who has just too little cleverness to quite make it to the Cabinet now “seem[s] to [Peter] the best,. . .the most disinterested” of men, and he chides Sally for claiming that Clarissa preferred Peter Walsh to such a figure (339). Throughout the passage he acknowledges alternatives to his earlier preconceptions and moves away from envisioning the world entirely in terms of his rejected love for Clarissa.

It is true that at the close of this exchange, Peter returns to asserting that “we know everything. . .at least, he did” (339). But this assertion now appears within the context of Sally's “despairing of human relationships”; her idea that life is just a process of “scratch[ing] on the wall of [one's] cell” in continually ineffective attempts to communicate, is one that Clarissa had long ago left behind and that Peter is now abandoning as well. “It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people” (302). “But,” they discover, if one sort of knowledge is impossible, another is. You cannot simply fit a person into a definition. What you can know, not rationally, but experientially, is “the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, [which] might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that” (302-3). Thinking back on this conversation, Peter has a revelation: this is precisely the sort of knowledge he has of Clarissa. “You were given,” he muses, “a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain—the actual meeting. . .yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel and understanding” (303). Peter's idealism has not died out: he still looks to Clarissa as an ideal by which he can “understand” life, but this is no longer an ideal limited by his past disappointment and imposed upon others. Only when his impulse to pursue and promulgate his vision of “order” has been tempered with the receptivity necessary to respect the inviolability of the individual other is he prepared for the final vision of the novel: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was” (341).

Part Three: Faulkner

Despite the vast differences between their narrative styles, both Austen and Flaubert seek to understand an individual through externals. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, by contrast, uses a variety of first-person narrators to give the reader direct access to individual consciousnesses: these consciousnesses, then, become the defining aspect of each character. Within the framework established by a controlling, selecting “narrative consciousness” are fifteen different accounts of the novel's action, each given by a secondary narrator with his or her own understanding of reality. The portion that Addie Bundren narrates from her coffin is strikingly different in focus from Cora Tull’s hypocritically religious interpretation of events or Anse’s unthinkingly self-centered understanding. Whereas the rest of the characters address and interpret the action and events of the novel directly, she explains the journey to the cemetery in Jefferson in terms of the deep, underlying motivations that led her to request this burial in the first place. The following passage is taken from her account of her early marriage to Anse, just after the birth of her first-born, Cash. Central to the paragraph is her preoccupation with the randomness and insecurity of language, a preoccupation that directs the course of her gradual withdrawal from husband and children into what she attempts to make a world of pure act, unmediated by the forms and words that seem to her to betray the truth of experience.

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn’t matter.” (164)

The narrative consciousness that frames Addie’s account preserves the idiosyncrasies of her stream-of-consciousness, to the point of using punctuation less in a conventional manner to separate discreet portions of dialogue (as an Austen would do) than in a manner that reflects the pauses and progressions of the experienced thought process. Commas mark mental pauses rather than grammatical units, and quotations are incorporated into Addie’s thought without the distinguishing quotation mark to set them off from her consciousness. This technique allows the reader, even as Addie explains her suspicion of language, to garner much additional information about her personality and character simply through the way in which this argument is presented.

The triad of short, dismissive sentences with which she commences indicates the skepticism that controls the paragraph; yet these abrupt dismissals of Anse’s “word” contrast with the complexity of structure and length at which she recounts her own visceral rejection of Anse’s perspective. She is either unwilling or unable (likely both) to examine the nuances of his consciousness, and will thus retain hers as the measure of everything she confronts. The anadiplosis and repetition of structures (I knew that. . ., that) also leads us to a sense of her everywhere-apparent intensity. She rejects Anse’s words out of hand and elsewhere rejects the verbal even violently, because she feels strongly about the insufficiency of this mode of understanding. Words cannot bring about the mingling of blood that she longs for as a means of defeating her isolation; Cash, as the fruit of her womb, is the only creature, at this point, she believes, to have “violated” her aloneness, and he correspondingly does not need words to communicate with her. One cannot truly, she argues, “fill a lack” satisfactorily with a “shape”; she has found this to be consistently the case in her experience, pointing to “the others” that have also failed to be of any use at “the right time”.

By the time we reach the end of the paragraph, the narrative consciousness has made clear precisely how Addie's rant about language relates, not merely to her personality and ideas, but to the plot unfolding as she speaks. Not only are words useless to convey meaning; Anse also is meaningless to her. His name can be interchanged with no alteration of what is being said with the “empty” term, “love”: despite being her husband, he too has failed to fill the lack, to connect blood with blood in the manner that she feels necessary. This point is crucial to her motivation for demanding the trip to Jefferson. Anse and love both are things that to her “d[on’t] matter,” and by the time she has had her affair with Whitfield she has similarly rejected both Cash and Darl, thinking them away so that “it doesn’t matter what they call” these two sons either. All that is left to her now as the root of her identity is the blood of her forbears in the soil in Jefferson; the family that she has acquired through ritual and verbal assent has no meaning for her. She demands the trip as “revenge” for being tricked by “words older than love or Anse”; her revenge is to get the better of this deception at Anse’s expense, to affirm the meaning of her roots above the meaning of the new life she rejects even as she participates in it.

Part Two: Flaubert

Performance is central to Austen’s aesthetic, both technically and philosophically. Flaubert’s meticulously-crafted short story, “A Simple Heart,” is similarly concerned with exploring the relationship between external action and the essence of a person, but unlike Pride and Prejudice, this tale of a simple servant woman with an extraordinary capacity for love does not focus on the relationship of personality to character. Félicité is, rather, a woman in whom choice and disposition are so fully integrated that there is no tension between the consistently selfless actions she undertakes and the sentiment towards which she is disposed. As we see in the following passage, Flaubert’s objective, removed narrator focuses not on tensions within Félicité’s character, but on the external challenges that the continual stripping-away of all the objects of her affection presents to her outlook on the world.

“For two nights Félicité never left the dead girl. She said the same prayers over and over again, sprinkled holy water on the sheets, then sat down again to watch. At the end of her first vigil, she noticed that the child’s face had gone yellow, the lips were turning blue, the nose looked sharper, and the eyes were sunken. She kissed them several times, and would not have been particularly surprised if Virginie had opened them again: to minds like hers the supernatural is a simple matter. She laid her out, wrapped her in a shroud, put her in her coffin, placed a wreath on her, and spread out her hair. It was fair and amazingly long for her age. Félicité cut off a big lock, half of which she slipped into her bosom, resolving never to part with it.” (39-40)

The death of the beloved young girl is only one in the series of losses that forms the substance of the narrative. Whatever brings Félicité joy—the arrival of a long-lost sister, the visits of her nephew, Victor, or the parrot Loulou—is stripped away from her, either by others or by circumstance. Yet despite every trial her character remains constant in its uncomplaining fidelity. The narrative voice juxtaposes the fidelity of the vigil with detail upon detail of the corpse’s inexorable decay, yet despite this narrative objectivity, the analytical comment “to minds like hers the supernatural is simple matter” does not leave the reader unaffected. Despite its objectivity, this observation, paired with the relentless material realism used to describe the corpse, propels us towards Félicité in sympathy while leaving us astonished at the constancy inherent in her response. Her simple, repetitive action culminates when she cuts lock of the girl's hair, preserving the single part of the corpse that retains its former beauty. This impulse to continue the vigil long past its material extent leads her to memorialize her lost loved one: a movement that she undertakes again and again in the story. Whether collecting a lock of Virginie’s hair or preserving Loulou’s stuffed body, Félicité accumulates material objects as tiny memorials to fill the shabby little room that is all that is left to her by the end of her life. In committing them to her memory, Félicité maintains her loving vigil, while the narrator's focus on these external manifestations of her memorialization avoids the sentimentality that might mar the description. Félicité's character is untarnished by loss because she has preserved all that she loves within an interior that the vagaries of the material world cannot access. Just as the narrator can access Félicité’s interior self only through the image of the time-worn room filled with bric-a-brac, so the ravages of time can only affect the external beings that contribute to her happiness, without accessing the core of joy that remains within herself.

Austen's Performative Art

Part one of a series of readings of three different novels, examining a dichotomy between individual life and social life that is very much pertinent to my study of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Pride and Prejudice is renowned for Austen's brilliant use of a satirical narrative voice, but equally brilliant is her use of dialogue to force the analytical narrator out of the spotlight and allow the interaction of one or more characters to stand on its own. The following exchange between Elizabeth and Darcy at the Netherfield ball is entirely performative, yet conveys a complete depiction of the dramatic tension of the novel, elsewhere explained by the narrator.

“Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do you imagine that you are gratifying mine?”

“Both,” replied Elizabeth archly; “for I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.”

“This is no very striking resemblance of your own character, I am sure,” said he. “How near it may be to mine, I cannot pretend to say. You think it a faithful portrait undoubtedly.”

“I must not decide on my own performance.”

As in any well-crafted theatrical piece, Elizabeth's hostility to Darcy is here conveyed through phrasing and implication rather than through narrative comment, while Darcy's growing attraction is communicated through his even-tempered response. Darcy's ironic “imagine” conveys his still-lively pride (she is wrong, he believes), yet leaves open the possibility that Elizabeth's “mistakenness” is rooted in an honest desire to “gratify” his feelings. Elizabeth, meanwhile, by presenting her judgment as an observation on their “similarity,” cleverly manages to maintain basic courtesy while criticizing him severely. They are not really similar in this respect: no attentive reader would argue that Elizabeth is unsocial and taciturn. Darcy himself understands this clearly, and rejects it as “no very striking resemblance of [her] own character”; his earlier reluctance to take offense at Elizabeth, however, again leads him to assume that “[she] think[s] it a faithful portrait” of him.

Within these few lines, Austen is able to address in miniature one of central the ethical concerns of the novel. Whatever emotional tensions are at its root, the subject of the conversation is the relationship between character and personality as this relation affects the possibility of judging another. Darcy rightly cavils at Elizabeth's claim to know him well enough to paint a faithful portrait of him. Yet whereas Elizabeth speaks of “disposition,” a term referring to the sum of one's personal inclinations, Darcy insists on saying “character,” a term traditionally associated with the way conscious choice builds upon the foundation of innate personality. Elsewhere in the narrative, he admits Elizabeth's claim about his disposition: he does incline to being reserved around strangers. Yet despite using the term “disposition,” Elizabeth moves implicitly into a discussion of character, of what the person inclined to taciturnity will actually do in a social context, when she asserts that Darcy is “unwilling to speak, unless [he] say[s] something that will amaze the whole room.” Elizabeth's judgment is hasty of course: Darcy is not merely arrogant, and if he does at times act thus, he struggles against the tendency.

However, while Darcy urges a qualification to her claim, he feels that he “cannot pretend to say” whether it is an accurate description of his own character cannot without being just as arrogant as Elizabeth considers him. Ironically, Elizabeth's lighthearted reply that she is likewise unable to “decide on [her] own performance” reveals that her understanding of the extent self-knowledge is fundamentally similar to Darcy's. One can have an accurate idea of one's own disposition, but it is arrogant to assume perfect knowledge of one's character: the latter is a social fact, not the sole property of an individual. Correspondingly one may, if highly perceptive (like Elizabeth) have some idea of another's personality, but this idea must necessarily be extrapolated from the other's social presentation. Only when Elizabeth comes to a better understanding of Darcy's character will she understand that he is in disposition more than a taciturn, arrogant individual: he is kind and generous precisely because he has cultivated these elements of his disposition through his performance of good actions.

Harper on "To the Lighthouse"

Howard Harper is currently very high up on the (small) list of Woolf critics whom I really like. As I've made abundantly clear to anyone who will listen, there's a really unfortunate tendency to read her political views (which, if you actually read a good biography you'll realize were a lot less important to her and more tenuously held than many assume) into her work. Thus love is bad and must be surpassed by the artistic vision. (Oh, right, because Woolf was a feminist. Therefore love, particularly married love, is bad.) Personally, I rather think that she is searching out a proper understanding of love that can serve as a context for responding to the world in general in a particular way. This often is betrayed by the common ways of defining love; for one thing, it can't be contained in a few words, as in a hallmark card or something. Hence in To the Lighthouse, for instance, Mrs. Ramsay's refusal to tell her husband that she loves him comes at the moment in the novel (save the conclusion, arguably) when her love for him is most clearly triumphant.

I could argue all this, but some of it will come into my major paper for the semester, and I really don't want to get bored with the topic. So here instead is a rather longish passage regarding the relationship of the artistic vision and the love that inspires it from Harper's admirable book, Between Language and Silence. It's not an argument at this point either, coming at the conclusion of a rather long chapter, but it's an excellent description. Note the secondary role that the former takes as the framer of something that can exist in every human life. In other words, there really is none of the arrogance of the artist that Woolf is often accused of in this vision. The artist's role doesn't surpass the best in ordinary human life, but orders and preserves it.(Woolf is hesitant to affirm this latter point, even.)

Lily's painting has somehow captured the meaning of the Ramsays and their voyage. Just as the depth and subtlety of the world of Part I had been subsumed within Mrs. Ramsay's awareness, so the essence of that world, reclaimed from the ravages of time, is expressed in the work of art. . .Lily's insight is, in some ways, greater than Mrs. Ramsay's. Lily sees her as a shadow and paints her as one. Yet in a sense, Lily herself becomes a shadow of Mrs. Ramsay, approaching in art what Mrs. Ramsay had done in life. . .To the Lighthouse is about hope and promises and, especially, love. And as Lily discovers, "Love had a thousand shapes." It is not only the love of man for woman, which the narrative sees as awesome and terrible. It is also the love of parents for children, and of children for their parents, love which also may find expression in puzzling, even outrageous, ways. It is the quiet love of friends, with its shelter of respect and privacy. And it is the love of the artist for art, which allows both intimacy and distance, detachment and desire.

The forms of love are also the forms of conflict--between mother and father, man and woman, parents and children, friends, the artist and the work of art. These tensions reach moments of unexpected horror, as when Mr. Ramsay says, suddenly, to the woman he loves, "Damn you!" Then the promised voyage to the lighthouse suddenly becomes even more necessary: Mr. Ramsay's unspoken guilt will last for more than a decade.

The problem, then, is somehow to come to terms with who and what one inescapably is, not really in hope of changing it, but in the hope of understanding it. The struggle is to comprehend, to express what is, to paint its picture, tell its story. When that story has been told, a kind of immortality is achieved, so that we can say of Mr. And Mrs. Ramsay what the brothers Grimm say of the fisherman and his wife [this Grimm story is an important recurring reference in the novel]: "there they are living still at this very time," fallen into ordinary mortality, as they must for ordinary mortals to recognize them. So their very mortality gives rise to their immortality. When the narrative discovers their authentic place in time, it also endows them with universality--and timelessness...

When chaos threatens to overwhelm her dinner, Mrs. Ramsay commands her children to "Light the candles." And they do. At her side, the poet [Mr. Carmichael] becomes "monumental" in the failing light. In that same realm of twilight, as the story of the fisherman and his wife ends, the failing light of day gives way to the first reflection, in the eyes of a child, of the light of love. Toward that light, to the lighthouse, the human spirit must always turn. in that light the most ordinary actions become monumental, archetypal, reflections of a love and longing which are so deep, so mysterious, that they can never be directly stated, only surrounded and suggested by poetry.

Tony Tanner on Pride and Prejudice

So, after reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time since I was very young (and practically drooling over Austen's perfect sentence structure the entire time), I read Tony Tanner's classic introduction, less because I wanted to than because it was assigned in class. Am I glad it was assigned! It's kind of fantastic, and I don't say that lightly. Especially after having done Junior poet, and most of the annotations part of Senior novel, I have a keen appreciation for good criticism; a truly depressing percentage of what somehow gets published is painfully inferior. Tanner's essay, in striking contrast to this norm, is intelligent, well-balanced, up front about his presuppositions, etc.

He opens the essay musing on the question of how Pride and Prejudice may be considered a novel relevant to Austen's early nineteenth century British society, despite the fact that it keeps well aloof from any discussion of the Napoleonic wars or various forms of contemporary social unrest within the burgeoning empire. As he observes, the central event can be reduced to “a man changes his manners and a young lady changes her mind” (368-9). Yet within a stable society, guided in nearly all its affairs by a strict set of traditions, the tension between these traditional forms and individual expression renders such alterations deeply effective: Tanner describes a tendency within such society to script the lives of others, and reduce knowledge of a person to knowledge of his or her role within the traditional forms. Moving first to explore these issues from the perspective of Pride and Prejudice's original title, “First Impressions,” Tanner discusses the emphasis that philosophers of Austen's time put on the distinction between “impressions” and “ideas”; the former is a complex of sensory and emotional responses to events and characters, which is then acted on by reason to form ideas. Austen is highly conscious of the problems inherent in this epistemological structure, as evidenced by the most basic elements of the narrative: the plot exists, one might go so far as to say, only because Elizabeth—and many supporting characters with her—has the misfortune of finding perceptions, or “first impressions” unreliable as a basis from which to draw true conclusions. Thus her assumption of Darcy's pride and ungentlemanly disposition leads her to give far more credence to Wickham's self-presentation than it deserves. Tanner moves on to note the essentially linguistic aspect of the misunderstandings and corrections of the novel. Acting as, and recognizing others as genuine or not comes down to a sort of discrimination between styles; the divide between social appearance and “inner” reality is least problematic where the style is at its best, that is, where it is most indicative of the truth about a person. Tanner notes the many instances wherein this is the case, the most important of which is the way in which Pemberley's tastefulness becomes a metaphor for its owner's well-ordered mind. He then observes that the novel itself moves formally from a dramatic mode of expression, in which impressions and experience are paramount, to a reflective, retrospective narrative mode that allows the reader to discriminate between “styles” of people just as Elizabeth is learning to do so. Unlike the many objects of Austen's harsher satire, who have in various ways lost the ability to relate as complete persons to their social role (Mr. Bennets solipsism and Mrs. Bennet's social superficiality are contrasted as two sides of the same coin), Elizabeth puts 'truth to self above truth to role' (390). She thus can recover from her initial judgments and fit the truth about Darcy into her initial impressions in a way that makes her re-understand both. “Love,” according to the Austenian definition, follows naturally from this re-comprehension. Both passion and romantic idealization are rejections of mature reason, and so are invalid definitions of love, for Austen; rather, it must be based upon a rational recognition that one possesses a true respect and regard for the other. Emotion, Tanner explains, must be able to be verbalized (that is, to be reasoned), or it is folly. Importantly, Tanner does not end the essay with an assertion of Austen's absolute preference for the path of formality and reason over Elizabeth's laughter (even when the latter is mistaken). While he suggests that several of Austen's later novels do display such a marked preference, Pride and Prejudice asserts above all the necessity of a union between the “wildness” that an Elizabeth Bennet is capable of displaying, and the rationality of Darcy. In ending with their marriage, Austen is above all asserting that social forms and individual energy are really only brought to their full potential when brought into harmony with one another.

“The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs. Dalloway.”

Hoff reads Mrs. Dalloway in light of Joyce’s contemporaneous publication of Ulysses, arguing that Woolf utilizes classical literary tradition in a manner that parodies Joyce’s “rigidly restrictive” employment of his Homeric inheritance. Finding obscure Homeric references in Woolf’s depiction of minor characters such as Mr. Bowley (who is “sealed with wax”) and Miss Kilman (recalling Scylla and Charybdis through her monstrous appetite both for food and people), the essay focuses on the parallels between Peter Walsh and Odysseus. Several of these parallels are persuasive at least in their potential as frameworks within which to understand this character; the identification of the garden world of Bourton as the Calypsean locus amoenus to which Peter desires constantly to return, but from which he is repeatedly distracted, is a particularly promising instance of this parallel. However, the essay suffers from two weaknesses. For one, it falls into the common trap of pushing a parallel a bit too far; many of the instances Hoff presents are almost impossible to give credence to, such as the idea that Peter’s visit to Clarissa is consciously reminiscent of Odysseus’ visit to Helen’s chamber towards the beginning of the Odyssey. Moreover, though purportedly aimed at pointing out the parodic nature of the text, Hoff neglects to provide any discussion of how exactly the parallels she discerns would be a parody  of Ulysses rather than a simple imitation, or at best, a project coincidentally similar in drawing on the Homeric world.

Lucio Ruotolo's "The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels"

Devoting a chapter to each of Woolf’s novels, Ruotolo incisively examines the phenomenon interruption as seen in the lives of Woof’s characters. The ability to accommodate interruption indicates an openness to undefined experience, he argues.  He contrasts the average citizen as he or she appears in Woolf’s non-fiction works, with the heroines of her novels; the former tend to rest in society’s formulaic explanations for the complexities of human life, while the latter habitually indulge “interruptions,” physical or intellectual, that allow them to conceive of the world more richly. The chapter on Mrs. Dalloway is particularly illuminating, as he makes use not only of Woolf’s non-fiction, but is able to highlight the way this patience with interruption grows into a primary characteristic of Clarissa Dalloway by contrasting the finished novel with the study “Mrs. Dalloway’s Party.”  In the finished novel she is tempted to “crystallize the present” (108),  as Ruotolo puts it, moving, for instance, from an intense enjoyment of the particularities of London during her flower-buying errand, to see the footmen and mysterious car as permanent signs of an unchanging, stable reality within her society. Yet the climactic party succeeds so well, Ruotolo argues convincingly, precisely because it is an image of Clarissa’s triumph over such impulse to reduce her experience to symbols: circulating among her guests to ensure the comfort of each, she allows the party to develop a life of its own and so “entertains a world of motion and change” (117).

Jacob Littleton's “Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman”

Littleton’s essay teems with fruitful and perceptive observations about aspects of Mrs. Dalloway ranging from the eponymous character’s conception of life to the contrast between community and individual isolation. The body of the paper focuses primarily on defining Clarissa’s artistic endeavor, arguing that her love of life for its own sake is at the heart of her ability to transmute this love into a communal setting at her climactic party. Her heightened awareness of existence leads her to find unity with others in shared experience and memory of shared experience, and Littleton intelligently characterizes her secular “faith” in such communal moments as a counter to the fear of death (physical or societal) that plagues her even to the close of her triumphant party. This excellent argument, however, forms only the central portion of the paper, and is rather weakened by being couched in political language that relates only distantly to his attempt to characterize her artistry. Depicting Clarissa as a subversive element in the midst of a stifling traditional society, the close of the paper comes off as rather bathetic after the highly engaging discussion of the body.

Forbe's “Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s Victorian ‘Self’ in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.”

What a pretentiously-titled essay, no? Forbes concentrates on the tension between private identity and the performance of a public role as it plays out in this day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway. Buying unquestioningly into her role as hostess, her day regulated by the demanding chimes of the Big Ben clocktower, Clarissa makes the error of equating her performance with identity, Forbes argues. The essay places much interpretive weight upon her occasionally-mentioned wish that everyone could “merely be themselves,” pointing out that her failure to pursue romance in the person of Peter Walsh, is an instance of her not being herself. Because personal desire conflicts with her social role, she is not, she believes, a unified self, as the Victorian aesthetic of her patriarchal society demands that she be. In pursuit of such unity, she substitutes role-playing for individuality, allowing the former state to dominate the latter impulse and decomplexify her identity. The essay makes in passing some valid points about individual symbols occurring throughout the novel (Big Ben, the streets of London), and some good observations about Clarissa’s thought process. But in seeing her as an essentially “failed” character, who has caved to the demands of a patriarchal society while ignoring all of the moments when Woolf emphasizes the ethically-oriented aspect of being a hostess, of trying to bring others into a temporary community, the essay makes essentially the same error it accuses Mrs. Dalloway of committing. Extrapolating a single, supposedly definitive, feminist interpretation of the novel from a few observations, it fails to see Woolf’s novel in the full complexity it deserves.

Senior Novel

And let the obsessive posting about Virginia Woolf begin! I'm studying Mrs. Dalloway for Senior Novel, and it's most likely that from now on a lot of this blog will be devoted to commentary on the critics, discussions of Woolf's work in general, and planning for the course-culminating paper. Huzzah!

The Wanderer

One of two Anglo-Saxon poems that we had to know for our rather absurdly easy comps, "The Wanderer" has been one of my all-time favorite poems since I studied it in Medieval Lit a few years ago. An obvious reason for this affinity is its Tolkein-esque-ness (how's that for an agglutinative?). Thinking of this, and being lazy as usual (when it comes to this blog, at least), I thought I would post a brief quote and see if it sounds familiar at all:

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune!
Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym!
Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære.

Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away,
dark under the cover of night,
as if it had never been!

This anaphora is a staple of the poem, and a large part of why I find it so powerful (the tragic background to this almost-narrative verse is another reason). Plus anything in Anglo-Saxon is irresistible to me. But aside from those remarks, what does this remind you of? Honestly, the resemblance to one of the hymns of Tolkein's Rohirrim is uncanny:

Where now the horse and the rider? where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harp-string, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning?
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

Or perhaps not so uncanny when you recall that Tolkein, besides being fluent in Old Norse and conversant in about 16 other dead languages was an aficionado of Old English. Rather nifty all the same.

Some Initial Thoughts Regarding "Mrs. Dalloway"

Katherine Hilbery of Woolf's Night and Day is introduced to the reader as a covert rebel against convention, preferring mathematics to hostessing, and dreading marriage as incompatible with her desire to think independently. Yet by the end of the novel, she has come to find marriage and independence to be quite compatible when love, not attention to social position, is at the root of the relationship. Lily Briscoe of To the Lighthouse similarly moves from frustration with those who have succumbed to the expectations of society, to accept Mrs. Ramsay's legacy: like Mrs. Ramsay, she eventually learns to give Mr. Ramsay, overbearing and unsympathetic as he is, the compassion he needs, enabling him to make the oft-deferred journey to the lighthouse. It may hardly surprise an attentive reader, then, to realize that the eponymous heroine of Mrs. Dalloway also comes to synthesize an independent, even idiosyncratic, interior life with the role society expects her to play. Clarissa Dalloway is a woman who can question her long-standing decision to marry Richard Dalloway rather than Peter Walsh. But she can as easily consider her conventional role as an integral part of her identity: her “passion for gloves,” for instance, she justifies by remembering old Uncle William's saying that “a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves” (172). She allows socially incorrect questions about death, loss of religion, and her past love for Sally Seton to mix in equal measure in her mind with her plans for a meticulously respectable evening party.

Given these divergent characteristics, Clarissa Dalloway, critics have a fiendishly difficult time explaining her apparent inconsistencies. Seeing Woolf solely in the role of the political deviant pushing a subversive feminism on her readers, most critics categorize her characters either as feminist “failures” or subversively successful in one way or another. Is her skepticism about such traditional standbys as religion or the intrinsic superiority of her class a sign of a liberated mind, or has she betrayed her individuality by accepting certain aspects of her upper-middle class existence as normal? In fact, I would argue that both these alternatives are senselessly reductive. In the final analysis, Clarissa Dalloway seems to be most simply put a lover of life: “what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab;. . .the ebb and flow” of London streets (170). Ethical implications arise from her various reactions to her social position, and I can hardly argue with these critics that an important tension exists between liberation and compromise. Yet for Woolf's characters, this tension is itself the solution to the problem of a reductive existence: her independent social workers and unthinking aristocrats come off as equally one-dimensional, and this hardly makes them attractive as characters. Her most compelling characters, rather, are those who are capable of balancing the social and independent, carried on in a series of moments that build upon one another but never define the person.

Notes toward a Literary Analysis of Beatrix Potter's "A Fierce, Bad Rabbit"

Intended to amuse, and to mildly satirize those literary critics who actually do bother with such things.

Beatrix Potter's brief tale of A Fierce, Bad Rabbit may come off as a simplistic moralizing story, in which the bad guy gets his comeuppance and the good guy is vindicated. And certainly that comic-book morality is at least superficially present in this war of two rabbits. Their differing ethical statuses seem to lead inevitably to their respective ends: the unjustifiably rude “Bad Rabbit” is paid back in deus ex machina fashion by a wandering hunter to the benefit of the good rabbit. But take a closer look at the story and several serious issues begin to raise their metaphorical heads. Firstly, why such a strident condemnation for what is merely a breach of manners (if an inexcusably unprovoked one)? Given her propensity for depicting villains of truly sinister dimensions (the Fox in Jemima Puddle-Duck plans to eat Jemima; Mr. Samuel Whiskers even more horrifyingly makes Tom Kitten into a pie before the unlucky chap is rescued), one may wonder why Potter designates only this schoolyard-bully-esque carrot thief as “fierce” and “bad.” It seems, oddly enough, that this deplorable character's only offense is being unmannerly: in Potter's own words, the height of his offense is that “he doesn't say 'Please.' He takes it!” In sharp contrast to the visceral dangers of her other books, the threat posed by this villain seems perfectly suited to a Jane Austen novel. The second issue one can hardly help noticing upon careful reading is the disjoint between cause and effect involved in the Bad Rabbit's punishment. In the narrative framework most pleasing to authors who intend to moralize, the bad guy is ultimately brought down either by his own evil actions (see Dante's Commedia or Edward Lear's children's verses) or by an adversarial reaction against his dastardly deeds. Yet the cleverly-aimed shot that manages to take off both the tail and whiskers of the Bad Rabbit without harming him is not fired by some good rabbit rising in rebellion against the tyranny of carrot-thieves, nor does the Bad Rabbit try to steal an incendiary device in an excess of cupidity and harm himself in the process. These would be two fine examples of poetic justice, to which parents could point, as they might to the fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” and say “see children: if you do X then Y will happen to you.” Where in fact is Potter's ethical subtext in this story? Could it be—but it is!—that the Bad Rabbit is worsted by mere happenstance? By the mere fact that this hunter is apparently more than a little near-sighted despite his uncanny skill in aiming and so thinks the Bad Rabbit “a very funny bird”? The good rabbit witnesses his humiliated foe fleeing the field, yet no retribution, properly speaking, has been meted out. Potter seems, I would argue, to be pushing young children to doubt the most basic elements of the moralizing tale, if only subconsciously, in this fascinatingly subversive tale of bad manners and random acts of an indifferent higher power.

L'Autonomie de l'Esprit saint dans la Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette

Apologies to those who can't read French, but I'm posting this largely for the few who can; most importantly my dad, who is a great fan of Georges Bernanos.


Dans la Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, la question du sort final de l'héroïne reste ambigu. Bien qu’elle meure physiquement, la vraie question, pour un écrivain catholique comme Bernanos, c’est de savoir si elle meurt spirituellement. Son suicide est, bien sûr, un péché mortel au point de vue de l'Église. Mais la représentation de sa mort n’est pas du tout sombre ; au contraire, l'auteur utilise même des images baptismales en décrivant comment elle fixe son regard sur « le point le plus haut du ciel » (181). Ce détail n’est pas une preuve certaine de sa rédemption, mais il en indique bien la possibilité. Il faut considérer le texte dans son ensemble pour bien en saisir toutes les implications. Mais plus important que notre jugement sur l'extérieur de l'histoire est le fait que Bernanos refuse au lecteur toute information qui pourrait décider de la chose d'une manière certaine. C'est peut-être le principal procède de cet auteur par lequel il préserve l'autonomie de l'action de l'Esprit Saint.

Il importe de considérer l'action de Mouchette sous deux aspects: l'extérieur et l'intérieur. À l'extérieur, on voit se dérouler une histoire assez simple du viol et du suicide d'une jeune fille. Quant à l'intérieur, c'est-à-dire l'état psychologique de Mouchette, l'auteur nous donne à intervalles assez espaces des éclairs fugaces. Ces éclairs suggèrent qu'il y a une pureté d'intention chez Mouchette, malgré son ignorance quasi-totale des principes moraux. Sa loyauté pour Arsène, la loyauté qui le lui fait défendre contre les soupçons de la femme de M. Mathieu, empêche sa pensée de voler « vers l'homme dont elle avait subi l'étreinte » (175). Elle dirige sa haine contre elle-même, pour éviter de la diriger contre Arsène, bien qu'une telle haine soit évidemment un grand péril pour son âme. Plus importante encore, peut-être, est l'instant fugace de tendresse auquel elle faillit se soumettre quand elle veut se confesser à sa mère mourante. Hélas, cette occasion lui est retirée juste au moment où sa résistance cède à ce désir, quand « la petite tête obstinée. . .s'abandonne, avec un gémissement de fatigue, et comme au terme de son effort » (114). L'instant d'abandon vient au moment précis où, selon toute apparence, il ne sert plus de rien. La faute, si faute il y a, n'est pas à elle, mais plutôt aux circonstances. Elle est prête à se livrer, mais les circonstances enlèvent à son geste tout efficace. Ces faits nous laissent imaginer, au moins jusqu'à la quatrième partie, que sa rédemption est une possibilité.

En revanche, L’ entretien qu'a l'héroïne avec la « vieille » dans la troisième partie montre un aspect plus sinistre. Cet évènement fait partie de la matière externe de l'histoire, mais il est étroitement lié à l’évolution spirituelle de l'héroïne; donc, c'est une expérience à mi-chemin entre les deux états de l'être: l'extérieur et l'intérieur. La vieille femme mal-pensante tente la fille avec une description séduisante de la mort, de la paix et la pureté qu'apporte celle-ci: après tout, comme la vieille l'affirme, « tout ce qui vit est sale est pue » (151). Cette tentation viennent juste après les derniers mots de la mère de Mouchette, qui a bien trouvé la paix dans la mort à la fin de sa vie si solitaire, et également après le souvenir de la « paix solennelle » de la mort de son grand-père, en dépit de son « visage torturé » (105). Donc, il n'est pas très difficile pour Mouchette de la croire. En tout cas, elle n'a pas même des outils élémentaires pour clarifier toutes les idées et les images qui se mêlent dans sa tête. L'idée évocatrice de la pureté ici associe à la fois le souvenir de son premier amour pour Arsène, maintenant désacralisé, à la vision presque hallucinatoire du linceul blanc que la vieille lui offre. L'intelligence de Mouchette SE révolte contre cette association, contre l'invitation de considerer la mort comme une libération, un soulagement, et elle crie « Vous me dégoutez, sale vieille bête » (160). Mais cette révolte consciente n'est pas assez forte pour extirper l'attrait de l'idée de confesser son histoire: la vieille la convie à « parle[r] à [son] aise » (161). Inconsciente maintenant de ce qu'elle fait, elle se confesse, mais à son insu et au notre, pour ainsi dire. Comme Mouchette réfléchit à l'entretien qu'elle vient d'avoir, elle se dit que « La merveille est que [la vieille] ait réussi à [m’] arracher son secret » (167).

À cet instant-là, on comprend qu'on est maintenant complètement dans le domaine spirituel. Les gestes extérieurs que Mouchette accomplit ne lui sont plus intelligibles, à nous non plus. C’est de propos délibéré que Bernanos écrit de cette façon oblique. À cause d'elle, la conclusion de l'histoire nous laisse dans l'obscurité quant au salut de Mouchette. Même quand on a prise en considérations les détails que nous venons d'énumérer, on doit reconnaître qu'on ne sait rien de sûr. Mais pour un catholique fervent comme Bernanos, une telle connaissance certaine serait inconvenable. Alors que d’autres auteurs modernes se permettent un accès illimité aux secrets intimes de leurs personnages, Bernanos garde une très grande réserve. Si on pouvait juger Mouchette, on usurperait la connaissance des âmes réservée à Dieu (et à quelques saints). Malgré tous les indices à propos de la trajectoire que suit Mouchette, dans l'évaluation finale il y a toujours place pour la volonté, le choix ultime qui va décider le destin. Et parce que le choix n’est pas fixé, il y a également toujours place pour l'action de l'Esprit Saint dans les actions humaines. Donc, on ne peut pas protester que ce que Bernanos a fait ici nous laisse incapables de dire quelque chose de concluant, parce que c'est un élément intégral de son art. Devant « la brèche à peine ouverte du désespoir dans [cette] âme simple », il ne peut rien de plus que compter sur l'action de la grâce de Dieu et garder l'espoir dans sa bonté (176).

The Fictionality of Fiction

According to Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass. Rather brilliant little book.

`Now, if you'll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I'll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there's the room you can see through the glass -- that's just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair -- all but the bit behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit! I want so much to know whether they've a fire in the winter: you never can tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too -- but that may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that, because I've held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room.

`How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they'd give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn't good to drink -- But oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking- glass House! I'm sure it's got, oh! such beautiful things in it!

Let's pretend there's a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through -- ' She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. `So I shall be as warm here as I was in the old room,' thought Alice: `warmer, in fact, because there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can't get at me!'

Impersonality in Woolf

Being the T.S. Eliot junkie I am, I've been rather fascinated--if not particularly surprised--to see the concept of the "impersonality" of the artist explicitly voiced in many other writings than his "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Because of his towering status, and his remarkable talent for expressing critical concepts in a way that made them seem unquestionable, people tend to remember his formulation. But the same idea exists in Yeats, Pound, Hulme, and last, but certainly not least, Virginia Woolf.

This idea Eliot expresses as follows: "What happens [in creating a work of art] is a continual surrender of [the artist's self] as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." One can get at a good idea of what he means here by considering that when you read an excellent book or poem, you're not primarily interested in what the author was feeling when he or she wrote it. (Not that the common assumption isn't the opposite--that art is sloppy self-expression.) The artist's actual experience and emotions will almost inevitable play a part in the creation of the work, insofar as the artist is a human person with emotions like everyone else, but the work itself is not merely an expression of those. The artist is "a medium and not a personality", as he puts it, not something himself to be communicated, but the means by which the pressure of the artistic process is exerted on the objects of everyday life to create a coherent whole out of what is otherwise disjointed.

It's hardly a surprise that Virginia Woolf, well-read and part of the highly literary Bloomsbury group which Eliot himself frequented would have been acquainted with this notion of impersonality, nor that this would be one of the objects she tried to achieve in her art. What did surprise me a little upon reading To the Lighthouse for the Twentieth Century Literature class was how explicitly she lays out this aesthetic within the novel itself.

The novel is famously divided into three parts, the highly experimental central part, "Time Passes", being (logically enough) a lyrical evocation of the passage of time and its inexorable erosion of the human constructs that have brought order to life. Both the first and second parts, by contrast, deal with the creation of a work of art. At the end of part one, Mrs. Ramsay, the paradigm of the gracious hostess, brings the "work of art" of a perfectly harmonized dinner party into being. Part three then ends with the parallel completion of a painting by Lily Briscoe, one of the guests at the Ramsays' summer house. Now just before either work of art is achieved, something rather important has to happen: both Mrs. Ramsay and Lily undergo a loss of personality that allows them to identify with the Lighthouse, the overarching guiding image of the novel.

"Losing personality," Mrs. Ramsay muses, "one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity". This peace, rest, and eternity are what she hopes to achieve in the dinner party, and what she will in fact accomplish. The tensions of "personalities" subside as each guest, under her tacit direction, subordinates his or her individual likes and dislikes to the artistic unity of the evening. This may be seen as regrettably hypocritical by some. Lily certainly feels a twinge of regret for the honesty of self-expression that Mrs. Ramsay's created order denies, saying to herself after a bit of conversation with the generally disliked Charles Tansley, "She had done the usual trick--been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her." But any brutal honesty displayed to Charles would be out of place in this unusual work of art that is so contingent not merely on Mrs. Ramsay's direction, but upon the cooperation of the participants. (By analogy one may imagine that the best of Shakespearean plays, untainted by the author's personality, may nonetheless be marred as a total work of art if the actors playing the parts cannot cooperate with the words on the page and insist upon bringing in their personal lives to their performances.) No cooperation would be necessary, however, without Mrs. Ramsay's personal success in effacing her own personality to the point at which she can be seen as "like" the Lighthouse. "It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things...felt they became one..." And in this disposition, she can attach herself to the other : to the Lighthouse's last, "long steady stroke" or--and this is most important--to another person. Because that is precisely what the dinner party and its aftermath end up being. Art as portrayed in "To the Lighthouse" is not merely some theoretical literary unity as it can come off in the essays of Eliot's younger days. It helps to effect human unity, to enable love that is the loss of the individual's preoccupation with self in his or her desire to know another. Lily, by not displaying her dislike for Charles at the dinner is enabled to later remember him not by that initial dislike, but by the moment of mutual liking brought about some indefinite time later with Mrs. Ramsay acting as catalyst. And in the aftermath of the dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay is able to wordlessly relate to her husband in a way that had been consistently elusive up to that point in the novel as she turns away from what is now her image in the Lighthouse to smile at him.

Lily's case can be covered in fewer words, now that this pattern is established. She is initially frustrated in her efforts to complete her painting by Mr. Ramsay's too-strong personality: "He imposed himself. He changed everything." (It will, incidentally, be Mr. Ramsay's moment of redemption when he too reaches the Lighthouse and has ceased in some way to impose himself.) But a sudden surge of sympathy in Lily allows her to resolve her resentment of him as he heads out on his journey to the Lighthouse, and this opens the door to a whole series of revelations about the nature of Mrs. Ramsay, of art, and of what is necessary to complete the painting. Mrs. Ramsay has been the one to teach Lily the value (though I would argue she only realizes it now) of "giving, giving, giving." And now Lily is able to make the connection between this selflessness, this lack of desire to merely express oneself, and the making of art. "'You' and 'I' and 'she' pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint. The crucial aspect of the painting she creates is not the intent behind it, but "what it attempted", the effort to achieve unity is what "remained forever".

Terry Eagleton and Wuthering Heights

I'm currently reading Terry Eagleton's book "The English Novel," which is really quite a good read, despite the fact that he's a Marxist critic, and I entered it a bit suspicious of his likely ideological bias. That exists, it certainly does, and I find rather skews his vision of what a novel is (is it really only a social instrument"? I disagree, at any rate), but whenever he delves down into criticism of/commentary on specific novels, he's quite perceptive. The key to this seems to be a certain intellectual honesty, by which Eagleton may heartily disagree with, say, Jane Austen's overall worldview, and certainly finds much problematic in the claim that any sort of absolute truth can be located by human society (it can't, that's why we have the Church, my friends, and that's what will always be missed as long as people insist upon considering the Church a purely social institution...), but he's willing to take the authors' ideas as they are. Thus you have here a genuinely remarkable admission that, yes, Jane Austen is a moral figure on the model of Aristotle and Homer, looking at a person's proper role in society as the context in which they live a moral life.

I'll take one example which has been rather on my mind of late. Wuthering Heights. He gives a remarkably "conservative" interpretation of this novel. Refreshingly, given how often that book has been distorted by readings that see it as little more than a sordid romance novel (think Stephanie Meyer and Twilight). Fairly obviously, even though I read it years and years ago, it is in part a serious critique of the Byronic hero, showing how uncontrolled "naturalness" in Heathcliff results in a grotesquely unnatural character who is willing to act atrociously to every person around him, using them more blatantly than the entire utilitarian society which he tries to escape. In short, Heathcliff is not a romantic hero. He's an antihero, and his romance with Catherine is a wild, egotistical fall into passion that is simply a hiatus in his general project of manipulating the society he loathes in order to gain revenge on basically everyone who's ever offended him. I do think Emily Bronte is more of a moralist here than Eagleton seems to give her credit for being, but he does a very excellent job of bringing out the contradictions inherent in Heathcliff's and Catherine's alternate acceptance of, then rejection of society--in both cases they are really using it as an objective standard to measure themselves against. Heathcliff, from what I can remember, pretty much defines himself in terms of his antagonism towards society, but in doing so, he's implicitly accepting the demands it makes on him as real...you can only "throw off" real constraints.

Now Eagleton more or less concludes claiming that the problem is that society exists in anything like a form that makes objective demands on its members. Or that's more or less the claim holding up most of the book. You can understand immediately why a Marxist would have a problem with that. Or really why any modern liberal would: human freedom has become the paramount value in their perspective. Any external force that influences behavior is an illegitimate invasion of human freedom--a capital crime.

I disagree with him here. The thing he misses--or rather, doesn't really miss, but is unwilling to admit--is that there may be some objective standard outside the purely human sphere of action, that human society, for all it's internal insecurity and propensity for error, may ideally be based on. And thus I see Bronte's suspicion of radical breaks with this society in terms of the ideal Jane Austen puts forward and can't bring myself to disagree with her all that much. What Eagleton has a problem with is that this ideal is rarely--one may even say never--really met. My question is...because an ideal is constantly unachieved, does that make it illegitimate in itself?

I've far too little time now to present a defense of that my actual position, or even to try to explain it more clearly, but the question should make things clear enough. Far too much to say, and work summons.

"An Ecclesial Existence"

I was delighted to find that Hans Urs Von Balthasar had written on Bernanos when I was searching Amazon for books related to my thesis topic.It was one of those innocuous-looking Ignatius Press "Communio"-line books. Usually you order them and they're tiny things, practically pamphlets (I admit, most of my experience in this line is Pieper, so my word is hardly authoritative). Given my associations with this publishing line, and the fact that I hardly expected a renowned theologian to be devoting a tome to my author-of-choice (who is so greatly undervalued in a world that often associates angst and angst alone with great literature), I was surprised to receive a 600+ pager in the mail a few days after ordering it.

Needless to say, I have not finished this book yet. Within the first hundred pages, however, it is (as one might hope) pretty clear the sort of approach Balthasar is taking. He's far too interested in--one might even say, enchanted by--Bernanos the man to veer off into abstractions about him as some archetype of the Christian writer. Yet somehow he does manage to consider him primarily as an archetype of the Christian writer while avoiding all sense that he's merely abstracting from the man. Sounds a bit paradoxical, but there it is. Balthasar takes Bernanos' life and his ideas, and uses them to present a picture of what the ideal of the Christian author is both in Bernanos' eyes and in Balthasar's own, and then in showing this slips in a hint or two that Bernanos' life, not merely his ideas, supports this ideal.

That's not to say that the book is a hagiography. Part of the respect Balthasar pays this writer is that of recognizing his faults, of pointing them out rather keenly--he never takes him as something superhuman, preferring to show openly Bernanos' failures, but always presenting them as they may be most charitably understood. And in this charitable understanding, one realizes that even these failures often contribute to Bernanos' overall mission. The sensitivity and vehemence of his personality, though his struggles against these never actually overcame them, manage to inform and give vitality to his desire to communicate the drama of God's relationship with man to a world he saw as almost bereft of the proper disposition towards its Creator. A world that is far from God, but never without hope, because the power of grace--Bernanos' most firm conviction, in Balthasar's mind--can do with it precisely what it can do with Bernanos' own failures: redeem them by making them a part of the work which it is only half consciously yearning to join.

The writer's job is not, then, some hallowed vocation above all other vocations, but rather a hallowed vocation like all other lay vocations: the writer's goal is to bring the world to the consciousness of its desires. And if he succeeds in so doing--as Aristotle, Aquinas, Bernanos and Balthasar would all agree--he will simply be bringing it to an awareness of its final end; as a Catholic would say, to an awareness that all its desires can be satisfied only in responding to God and His plan of grace for the world.