Another George Eliot Quote

"...the great question was how to give every man a man's share in life. But I think [the trades-union speaker] expects voting to do more towards it than I do. I want the working men to have power... But there are two sorts of power. There's a power to do mischief - to undo what what has been done with great expense and labour, to waste and destroy, to be cruel to the weak, to lie and quarrel, and to talk poisonous nonsense. That's the sort of power that ignorant numbers have... Ignorant power comes in the end to the same thing as wicked power; it makes misery."

George Eliot may have famously aimed at realism in her fiction, but she still seems to have had a weakness for the figure of a handsome young man who tells the Truth. Unless I'm remembering this incorrectly, Will Ladislaw is of a similar type, although not as forceful as Felix Holt. Neither seems quite real, a little too idolised by their creator. Clearly, in the speech which is excerpted above taken from Chapter 30, Felix is voicing something of his creator's views, and his truth telling is surely meant to convince us, his readers, of the rightness of those views. Such an honourable character, so right about so much, could hardly be mistaken here, for all that there are a number of points in the novel where he comes across as an insufferable prig. I've actually taken this quote from the introduction to my Penguin Classics edition of the novel. It's clearly an important moment in the novel's ideological scheme.

I'm being unnecessarily snide. And Middlemarch is actually one of the finest novels I've ever read. Something I don't think I've notice about George Eliot's writing before is just how funny a writer she can be. Perhaps that's inevitable when writing about characters involved in politics, but it also seems a part of her interest in realism and psychological acuity. More likely, her humour is something I can only now fully appreciate. I was a rather over serious young man when I was younger.

What I'm most interested in here is her emphasis on the importance of education. Politically George Eliot might have been no radical, but she was clearly on the side of gradual reform and the general improvement in people's circumstances. She's probably correct to be sceptical about the value of the vote in and of itself. We have a much greater franchise now than was ever conceived of in 1866, yet it's arguable how much power that has actually given people, even if we do manage to win a change in the electoral system in the referendum next week. It's certainly hard to argue that it's made people better, however we might choose to define that.

About education she's much more positive. It's typically mid-Victorian to have such a positivist attitude towards education, and there was recent research which seems to bear out the idea that the more educated you are then the less conservative you are likely to be. It makes a difference. Of course, as the example of someone like Nick Griffith demonstrates, you can have a degree from Cambridge and still believe in the most poisonous nonsense, and there are plenty of other examples one could cite. It could almost be a Liberal parlour game. The Nazis listened to Classical music you know! Just pick one of your most hated political figures and chances are they'll give you a reason to be sceptical about the supposed virtues of education.

On the other hand of course, I also work in academia. Or I'd like to, once the PhD is completed. Obviously I believe that the academic work I do has some value, and that the current attacks on universities by a lot of university educated fools are fundamentally ignorant and destructive. I'm an educated person who has never had to fight for their access to education. It's something I can take for granted and I know there are many people around the world who don't have that luxury. I believe in the importance of literature, art, music. It's all such a part of me, of who I am, of the identity I've constructed for myself. So I think it's incredibly important, and I resent the ideology which would ascribe value to something only once a price tag has been been applied. As Alan Garner says somewhere, accountancy is a fine profession, but we don't want to live in a world run by accountants.

I find that I flip back in my mind between these two positions, that education, the joy of knowing things, is one of the supreme joys of existence. And it is! And simultaneously believing it to be largely worthless and trivial, something which I think George Eliot also knew, as she went on to create Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch with his endless meaningless academic work. I doubt I shall ever manage to resolve these two positions, because it does change you, obviously, although not in any way which feels obvious. I'm not the same person I would have been if I hadn't decided to go into academia and get those extra degrees many of my friends don't have, but I would find it very difficult to say how exactly.

Quotes

"...a way of dying before you die..."

Jeanne Moreau on nostalgia

"A rest on life's way. I had an hour and half's wait and took myself off to the abbey church which always calms me: why I am never sure. Perhaps just because it is there and has been for a thousand years - a shaped stone quarry turned turtle. Once under ground. Now upon it. So I sat alone by the west door and dived, drowning in its immensity. And stillness. And emptiness. So that, when I surfaced at the railway station, waiting for the train on its way from Norwich, I felt buoyant and quite myself again, ready, aye ready to outface fate, come what may."

J.L. Carr, What Hetty Did

"It was strange to see someone who was so frightened by life: it took him a huge effort to overcome himself. At first I wanted to make fun of him, like everyone else; but it didn't take long for me to realise that in reality I'd never known anyone with so much courage."

Tim Pears, In the Place of Fallen Leaves

"Things aren't simple. Things change. You see how people are, and you think they were always like that. You don't realise what people do to accomodate themselves in the world."

Tim Pears, ibid.

George Eliot quote

"For a moment he was fully back in those distant years when he and another bright eyed person had seen no reason why they should not indulge their passion and their vanity, and detirmine for themselves how their lives should be made delightful in spite of unalterable external conditions. The reasons had been unfolding themselves gradually ever since which had converted the handsome, soft eyed slim young Jermyn (with a touch of sentiment) into a portly lawyer of sixty, for whom life had resolved itself into the means of keeping up his head among his professional brethren and maintaining an establishment - into a grey haired husband and father, whose third and affectionate daughter now rapped at the window and called to him, 'Papa, papa, get ready for dinner; don't you remember that the Lukyns are coming?'"

                                                            George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical

a masterpiece...

...because I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about how good this book is.

I have a vague memory of hearing that Lorna Sage won the Whitbread prize for autobiography for her memoir Bad Blood, probably when the paperback came out later that year. No doubt the story attracted more attention since she died only a week after it won. I see also that a few years later there a posthumous publication of her selected journalism, an honour I think can have been accorded to few academics who aren't Frank Kermode. No doubt her publisher was attempting to feed the interest generated by that memoir for a writer whose other writings were chiefly academic.

I shouldn't sound so snarky. This really is one of the finest books I've read in some time. I'm fairly sure I remember encountering her Women in the House of Fiction during my undergraduate degree. I don't think that will have been the reason why my mother bought her memoir though. In fact, I'm not sure if she ever read it. I've been noticing it on her shelves for a while now.

Almost the first thing which attracted me was brief excerpted the reviews just inside the front cover. They're almost as fascinating as memoir they advertise, and perversely perhaps, it's a few of these reviews I want to address here.

An unnamed writer from the Guardian sententiously opines "Nothing else I have read destroys so successfully the fantasy of the family as a safe place to be...", a sentiment which, as someone who grew up in what was largely a very happy family I can't help but find rather insulting. Of course we had our difficulties, and of course I'm not so naive as to believe that all families are happy or 'safe'. I know several people whose experiences put the lie to that. But this is as insulting a prejudice as the Daily Mail assumption that all families are sacrosanct and special. You can't make such a sweeping a generalisation about an cultural institution which exists in so many different forms, and which everyone belongs to in some way or another. And it's not really the story that Lorna Sage tells. She describes her difficult relationships with her parents and grandparents with scrupulous clarity, but what also comes through is a love for these eccentric individuals. Whatever else they were, they were also her family, and she is equally conscious of what she has inherited from them. There seems very little bitterness, something a few of the other reviewers comment on, although Marina Warner also feels happy to label it a picture of a 'childhood hell'. That 'Bad Blood' of the title seems like a source of pride and creative energy as much as it might be intended as a badge of shame.

Rachel Cusk, writing for the Evening Standard, voices another unexamined prejudice when she claims 'This "memoir" has all the qualities of fiction'. Which is, quite clearly, also rubbish. The qualities it possesses are those of any stunningly written book, but these are not qualities which are the sole purview of fiction. There are a great many works of art found within non-fiction forms. Appropriating a book like this to the category of 'fiction' with Rachel Cusk's scare quotes makes a mockery of literary categories and privilages fiction in a way which is more than a little silly.

More silliness comes from Jonathan Raban, himself responsible for more than a few works of art within non-fictional categories, who wants to make a monument out of Lorna Sage's book: 'What a book for this country now. She makes Hanmer, Whitchurch, the shop, the ailing haulage business, the lightless houses, the mad relations, into the real ancestral England, from which the English have ever been on the run'. It's interesting to think about this quote in the context of recent remarks by the Midsommer Murders producer who claimed that his show was 'the last bastion of Englishness'. The assumption in both cases is that there is a single, easily reducible 'England' that we can all agree on. On the contrary, I think that Englishness, like any national identity, is multiple, and no, that's not just because I'm an academic and 'multiple' identities is a fashionable term. It could be a fashionable term for all I know, but fashionabe or not it just seems to me to be self evidently true. The North is distinct from the South. Town is different from country. London is different from York. The Lake District is distinct from the Cotswolds, which is distinct from the Yorkshire Moors, which are distinct from the East Anglian Fens. Yet all of these landscapes and places are identifiably English to me.

At least Jonathan Raban doesn't try to claim that it is something which should be protected in some way. And Lorna Sage is exceptional at placing her story in its historical context. Appropriately for the literary critic she was, her childhood association with a local farmer leads to a subtle disquistion on Hardy and the farming life and culture which was (is) perenially in decline. Her story is one of post war social mobility, and it doesn't stop at its end, when she acknowledges that it was her daughter who became the future in the 60s. This is a narrative I've heard before, in autobiographical writings from Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Alan Bennett, Derek Jarman and others. I imagine that might be what attracted my Mum to it, because it's even, just about, my parents' story. They were born later, in 1950 and 51, and reached university at the tail end of the 60s, but I still feel theirs is a part of that same post war narrative. But each story is distinct, belonging to that person alone. If books were Lorna Sage's passport out of her family and social environment, as Marina Warner's excerpted review suggests, then it was a passport freely given to her in childhood. The changes British culture was undergoing at that point allowed a very clever girl to succeed where previously she might not have done, which is not to deny her agency in her own narrative. It's just to acknowledge, yet again, that we make our own history, but not in the circumstances of our choosing.

It's also a narrative that I feel has now become much harder to occur. For a variety of reasons, education no longer seems to carry the authority it once did. Everything is much more utilitarian now, and many of the post war gains have been eroded over the last 30 years. It's one of the reasons I find this period of British history so fascinating. It was far from a perfect time, because no time is perfect, but there was something positive in the culture then (although I would struggle to articulate just what precisely that is) which I wish hadn't been so willfully discarded.

Black Narcissus

"She was fond of these people. She could not remember when it was that she began to think of them as people; not as natives, persons apart, but as people like themselves, and she was beginning to see with their eyes. Ayah's brown hands carrying a bowl of water no longer seemed alien, but, rather, her own hands stretched out to take it seemed insipid."

I have no idea if Rumer Godden is a name which appears within discussions about post-colonial literature. It's not my field after all. Without checking though, I have a feeling that there probably hasn't been too much academic writing about her work. She wouldn't seem to fit into any obvious syllabus or academic paradigm. Her earliest fiction appearing in the 1930s, she wasn't a late modernist. Nor has her fiction achieved the fame of Kipling or Forster, so I imagine she's the sort of writer post-colonialists would probably overlook in favour of writing from formerly colonised subjects. Which I wouldn't argue with necessarily.

Not that all of her writing belongs in such a potentially limiting pigeon hole, but this novel certainly does. Adapted by two of Britain's greatest filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1947, it's jewel-like colour achieved through Technicolor and the genius of Jack Cardiff, in many ways it's a very odd film. David Thomson describes it wonderfully as "that rare thing, an erotic English film about the fantasies of nuns". Reading the novel, even when it's been some years since I last saw the film, it's hard not to hear the actors' voices in my head, with so much of the film's dialogue lifted straight from the book.

Sister Clodagh leads a group of nuns in to a remote part of the Himalayas, in an attempt to found a nunnery in a palace which used to be used as a harem by a previous ruler of the area. The blurb on the inside page of my copy describes it, in rather over the top fashion as an "...evil haunted palace...". A supernatural explanation is occasionally gestured at, most clearly towards the end of the novel by the current General of the area towards the novel's close, but even he is far too subtle to fall into such a clear cut explanation. It's not ever quite clear what happens to this isolated group, as they slowly lose their grip on their identities. Sister Clodagh, at the book's heart, is plagued my memories of her Romantic past in Ireland. These come upon her unbidden, triggered by people and things in her present in a manner which is almost Proustian but is far less fussily conveyed.

Of course, to describe them as isolated is somewhat ridiculous. They are surrounded by people, by the natives, who are for the most part an undifferentiated mass, even in some cases where they are named. We are allowed into the thoughts of only two of the Indian characters, and then only briefly, one of whom is desperately trying to be more 'European'. Our point of few is firmly with the British, who mostly fail to understand the people by whom they are surrounded. And yet the presence of the 'natives' and of the mountain and the air is constantly hovering over the narrative. The Generals English advisor, the unkempt Mr. Dean, is supposed to have gone native, we're told so at several points, and yet he repeatedly refers to the local people there as savages and children. He's like a cuddlier Mr. Kurtz.

If the climax of the novel represents a tragedy, which in many ways it clearly does, its partly a failure of communication. The failure of these people to coexist with a place where they don't belong. In her introduction to another of her books, Rumer Godden describes India in an idealised manner, "Indians do not change; their clothes and customs are timeless". Now, as it happens, I shall be going to India next week, to visit my wife's family, and I highly doubt that the country I shall experience a small part of will be exactly unchanged or 'timeless'. In the three and a half years since my wife last visited, some things will have changed for her. Part of what changed India was the presence of the British, a presence which produced a writer such as Rumer Godden. Was she saw as timeless had already changed, because everywhere does. Yet, alongside this somewhat patronising attitude, there's also a respect for the people as they are. As Sister Clodagh starts to realise, these are people just like oneself, but it occurs to me that that is a recognition which only makes others more mysterious. If you regard someone as part of a mass, however you manage that, then they are simple to understand, because you're fitting them to a prearranged pattern. To see somebody as an individual, as a person, is to admit that you don't understand them. They have an interiority which you don't have access to, and part of the violence of colonialism is that that it denies that fact. Even in as apparently mild a novel as this, which never directly addresses the subject, just as it never really directly addresses anything, which is one of its strengths as a novel. All of its characters are the products of colonialism, whether its Mr. Dean who 'goes native' but still stands apart and in some way looks down upon the native people who surround him, the Young General who wishes to become 'European', or Sister Clodagh, whose memories of Ireland eventually reveal her as Anglo-Irish, playing with the 'Irish children' but set apart in another colonised landscape.

I think can I understand why this book might have appealed to Michael Powell, a High Tory, who nevertheless filmed an Indian set story entirely in England, principally on Alfred Junge designed sets in order to better keep control of the colour. As the Wikipedia entry for the film shows, the final scene, which magically depicts the beginning of the monsoon as the nuns abandon the Himalayas, has been interpreted by critic Dave Kehr as 'a last farewell to their fading empire', resonating with the fact that the film was released only a few months before India achieved Independence. But the novel already represented a respectful retreat, the General is sorry to see the Nuns leave, because that's the only solution Rumer Godden can envisage to the difficulties raised in her fiction. Its doubly sad, obviously because of the tragedy with which the novel climaxes, but also with the sadness of people failing to understand each other.

"No, I am not Prince Hamlet..."

I was re-reading 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufock' yeststerday morning just before I left for work. As you do. It's a poem I've always loved, but what really struck me this time was just how funny it is. Of course, Raymond Chandler makes fun of the lines about the women quoting Michelangelo at one point in The Long Goodbye, but I think he must have missed the point that the poem itself is comical. It's hard to pin down just what the humour is precisely. It read like a self dramatising performance. I remember reading somewhere that Eliot was prone to representing himself as a old man even when he was still young, and there are repeated references to aging, but isn't that often a youthfull attitude? For myself at least, I know that I was a lot more upset about growing old before I turned 30 than I have been since.

If it put me in mind of anyone else, I think it was probably Morrisey, back in his heyday with The Smiths, whom I haven't listened to in an age. There's a similar self dramatisation at work, and the humour feels the same, so subtle that it could easily be missed, a delicate balancing act. It's a wallowing in misery and self conciousness whilst simultaneously laughing at oneself.

"Heaven knows I'm miserable now..."

Birthday post

32 years old today!

"...with all the books and all the records of your lifetime..."

Currently doing a fair bit of sorting out, which is one of the reasons I've not being able to blog as much as I'd like to just recently. It's always interesting what you turn up when you have a proper sort out or move house. The things you'd forgotten you had. The things you don't even remember owning. The things you're relieved to see again, glad that you didn't get rid of them during the last sort out you had. One of the things I came across the other day was my old diary, which of course I do remember keeping.

Looking at the entries (I was always carefull to date every entry I made) I see that I must have kept it for a period of roughly 8 years, from shortly after I began my Undergraduate degree, through to 2005, when I think I finally stopped as I'd mostly lost interest in keeping it. The gaps between entries became longer and longer. Maybe I'd finally run out of things to say. Seeing the length of some of the entries I made I can only wonder that I had the time to write so much. And what exactly did I find it so necessary to write about at such length? Memories, daydreams, quotidian day to day stuff which I always wanted to make significant. Which I suppose it was for the person living it. I also collected quotations, and selotaped in pictures and pieces torn out of newspapers. It was something of a scrapbook. And I wrote about the books, comics, music and films that inspired me, which is what I want to try and write about in a more structured way here.

I don't think of this blog as a substitute for that diary. I know that there are people who keep personal blogs, which is something I don't fully understand. Not that I'm critical of the desire to record personal details in such a semi-public forum, it's just not one that I share. Although obviously, as the entries about one's personal taste mount up and the style of your writing becomes familiar to your readers, I'm sure that something of a sense of the person writing a blog must come through. By its very nature blogging feels slightly informal which encourages that personal feel.

Not that I imagine I have any readers at this point! I'm not even sure if I want any. In my first post I described this online space as semi-public, which is how I still tend to think of it. It's personal, but also available to anyone who comes across it. Which at least answers the question I could never quite answer when I did keep a diary, of who I was writing it for.