Middlemarch, George Eliot. 1871. 736pp.
I found
Middlemarch immediately quite painful, in that funny, tender way. Learning in the foreword that Eliot translated Spinoza and was considered very ugly gave me one of those terrible parasocial fantasies of kinship that can make every comment in a novel feel like an aside across time specifically to you. So much of this novel is about what it might mean, for various people under various circumstances, to make the pursuit of knowledge their life project and guiding purpose. Or, rather, not knowledge, but:
But something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge? (64)
Eliot depicts this yearning in all its silliness and sadness. As a female would-be intellectual, Dorothea, “struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labryrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no wither” (21) is desperate to exercise “the energies which stirred uneasily under the dimness and pressure of her own ignorance” (32). I can’t tell you how miserable it might make you to read these passages, which so gently lay out Dorothea’s foolish belief that the knowledge guarded by Casaubon will deliver her from the suffering of purposelessness, if, perhaps, you were concurrently wracked with the throes of PMC white-collar burnout and gathering materials for desperate applications to graduate school.
The men of this novel, although they have all the opportunities of which Dorothea has been deprived on the basis of her sex, are frequently as tragic as she is. This is because Eliot understands that while unfreedom is terribly real and stunting, there is no satisfaction in freedom either. There is for example the great and understated pathos of the curate Farebrother’s insect collection, as Farebrother wistfully speaks of his essays in entomology, his “spiritual tobacco”, as the real energy of his life rather than his daily work (128). Casaubon, who really commits to the project, and for all that, near the end of his life, discovers in place of the love that falls toward him for the first time “a certain blankness of sensibility…he was as utterly condemned to loneliness as in the despair which sometimes threatened him while toiling in the morass of authorship without seeming nearer to the goal. And his was that worst loneliness which would shrink from sympathy” (63). Lydgate’s arrogance and his conviction of his specialness, which even so endears us because he will not be rude and because he wants something, and we know what it is like to want something; Will Ladislaw taking too much opium in an effort to provoke a stroke of genius.
The impish result of this concatenation of examples is that Eliot must have us conclude that there is no genius, and that these poor sinners are toiling after nothing. This is troublesome because Eliot herself is a genius and her work really did achieve the type of immortality that her characters dream of. But as far as most of us go she’s probably right; and, after all, we have no evidence that being a genius made her happy.
I have a feeling that Spinoza is an enormous influence on this novel, and I have been thinking of Spinoza as somebody who will be very important to me once I can get there. I am sure I will revisit Middlemarch many times.
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Persuasion, Jane Austen. 1817. 288pp.
A charming little book to be sure, but after reading Middlemarch it feels a bit flimsy and ill-tempered. One virtue is its meaner satire of the rich.
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The Republic, Plato.
I’m still thinking about that final myth set in the land of the dead around a rainbow pillar: the woman soul who selects the life of a male athlete, the male hero who selects the life of a seamstress, and Odysseus, who selects the life of an ordinary man, brimful of relief. There’s something so soothing about the idea that everything that happens happens because you chose it in another life, for some reason now unknown only to you. (Soothing in the same way as Spinoza’s determinism, which gently says, there’s after all nothing you can do.) Soothing doesn’t mean correct or indeed just. I’ve been paging through some writing on the
Republic, and I’m looking for someone to help me in exploring my feeling that the myth of the chosen life will best clarify this playful and baffling work. It's a myth that purports to justify, in this deceptive and pacifying way, how exactly the role that we are meant to play in society winds up marked on our foreheads, such that we might conform to Socrates’s vision of righteousness as division of labour.
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The Prince, Niccoló Machiavelli. 96pp. I also read this, but I don’t have anything to say about it just yet, not out of disinterest. I'm starting on the Discourses.
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Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters. 1998. 480pp.
I read this very quickly, and it left a very good impression on me. Of course, knowing that Waters was in academia makes it almost a game of esotericism to point out how her plot relies on a set of elegant modulations and reversals between male and female, public and private, poor and rich. (A sister, in both this structure and the obviousness of the structure to the initiated eye—an obviousness that increases rather than decreases critical pleasure—is Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent film
One Battle After Another.) The key phrase is the one that Nancy produces near the end of the book: “I feel like all my life I’ve been playing different peoples’ scripts”. And, actually, as I mention below, I think in its modulation between male and female Waters either unconsciously cannot overcome (in an interesting way) or purposefully never transgresses a certain barrier between male and female, that is, the barrier of domination and sadism, which Highsmith can do effortlessly. This is probably because Highsmith was by all accounts an incredibly unpleasant person; I regret to report from the inside that for women structural androgyny requires the cultivation of unpleasantness. Note that, if I were truly androgynous, I wouldn't regret it.
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The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith (as Claire Morgan). 1952. 262pp.
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith. 1955. 271pp.
I’m not quite charmed by Highsmith as I am by Waters, but as I wrote these paragraphs I began to convince myself of something unusual and special in Highsmith after all, which might be female sadism (a topic I am becoming interested in). Ripley is the better novel, I think, for its formal strangeness, the rubbed-out lack that is its central character. He is not dashing, I was surprised to learn in contrast to the cultural osmosis I’d received, but pathetic, in a way that specifically underscores his sexual ambiguity. He always comes across as a jilted woman. Perhaps the Matt Damon movie distorted our thinking: it’s hard not to be impressed by watching Matt Damon be rich. One of the benefits of a novel, in this regard, is its ability to avoid the visual, with its seductive illusions. I guess these are both novels that are exercises in unpunished transgression of the law, with suitable inversions. We are sympathetic to Carol and Therese’s escape from the sexual law, but of course we regard Ripley’s transgressions with moral ambivalence or repulsion.
Let me run two ideas by you. First, the conflation of the intuition of purity with the intuition of morality has always bamboozled writers who, like Socrates in the Gorgias, find themselves arguing that something is wrong about catamitism (”terrible, foul, miserable”) in the same way that something is wrong about murder. There is very much a qualitative difference between a trangression of impurity and a transgression of harm. Isn’t there? This is the problem with writers like Bataille and de Sade who valorize all trangression equally, who want murder to be like sexual freedom.
Second, there is something culturally different about the transgression of gay men and the transgression of lesbians: the transgression of lesbians tends toward a negative transgression, the transgression of not doing what the law commands (playing the submissive and sexually available role of a female), while the transgression of gay men tends toward a positive transgression, the transgression of doing something that is forbidden (sodomy). In each of these novels Highsmith’s intuitions about transgression intersect interestingly with this vague intuition of mine, but the fact that her plots don't allow me to forward the idea, that
The Price of Salt centres around the discovery of a positive transgression by the private detective while
Ripley centres around--I'm not sure--makes her protagonists somehow more bisexual-in-the-old-sense than Sarah Waters’ cross-dressing submissive in
Tipping the Velvet. One might indeed think that this is because sexuation is fundamentally about structural role, and not about what you wear.
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