Why my students like Jane Eyre

Sorry about skipping around in the syllabus here – but we just got through Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea the other day and thought I would share some thoughts with you.

Wide Sargasso Sea narrates the story primarily from the perspective of the “madwoman in the attic” from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is the story of Jane Eyre, an impoverished, sincere, virginal, rosy-cheeked governess who shows up at Mr. Rochester’s Thornfield Hall in order to take care of his ward. Mr. Rochester is dark, brooding, enormously wealthy, and naturally they fall in love. Their wedding is interrupted with the revelation that Mr. Rochester is already married to a woman named Bertha Mason, a woman he’d met in the West Indies who had consequently gone insane, so he locked her up in the attic of his creepy mansion. But not to fear – although Jane is horrified and abandons Rochester, she returns to Thornfield Hall to discover it in ruins. She learns that Bertha Mason had gotten free one night and had burned the place down, committing suicide in the process, and Mr. Rochester emerged from the fire horribly disfigured and blind. Nevertheless, she ends up with Rochester anyway, because they really, really, really love each other.

The Norton edition of WSS that we use for the class is quite handy in that it includes relevant excerpts from Jane Eyre. What’s remarkable to me is how much my students loved what they read of the Bronte novel. The majority of them are women, and I think the novel strikes a romantic chord. (Masterpiece Theater recently produced a wonderful adaptation of the novel, by the way.) In a telling moment, I asked them what they would do if they found out at the altar that their fiancé were already married, and, what’s more, he’d been keeping his crazy wife in the attic of the house they’d been sharing all this time. Dead silence. I think they were really thinking about what they would do. I had to remind them that it was a terrible idea to stay with someone after going through something like that – call me a cynic. In fact, I think Bronte deliberately gives us the most absurd, unimaginable scenario in order to amplify the power of Rochester’s confession to Eyre. Truth can conquer all; Rochester’s confession dispels both the exotic savage in the attic and the shadowy, morally murky terrain of Gothic fiction. And that idea – truth can conquer all, truth is love and love is truth – is very romantically appealing. Moreover, the disfigurement of Rochester ensures that the relationship between him and Eyre is a relationship of pure or spiritual love, expurgated of all sensuousness, as opposed to the lusty relationship he shared with the madwoman.

All of this is turned on its head in Wide Sargasso Sea. Instead of the revelation (and Revelation) of Truth, we have the confusing clash of narratives from Antoinette's and the male narrator's point of view. The male narrator (never identified as Rochester) draws a distinction between "his way" of dying and hers. "His way" of dying is the conventional sense of dying as sex, as orgasm. But then he makes the mysterious reference to "her way" on the next page. What her way of dying is is omething that the novel never tells us explicitly, but is something we have to uncover, and we can only uncover this way if we get beyond our own prejudicial reading, firmly rooted in years of Jane Eyre worship, of Antoinette as the half-savage madwoman in the attic.

new word for you

Just thought you should all have this word in your vocabulary: "insmell."

In Beckett's Murphy, the topic of a future blog entry, there is a very malodorous landlady who has an "insmell into her infirmity." That is, she smells bad and she knows it.

I just think it's a great word -- please use it liberally.

Crack is ...

(well, you know.)

The second book on our course reading list is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, winner of the Booker of Bookers, voted the best book to win the Booker, the British Pulitzer, in 25 years. Rushdie is perhaps best known for the scandal over Satanic Verses, which got him a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini. After the fatwa was lifted, Rushdie went on to produce more novels (not as interesting, in my opinion), including one either inspired by or the inspiration behind a U2 song, and he served for a few years as the director of the PEN center in New York. He is also married to one of the most vapid cooking show hosts ever, Padma Lakshmi, whom you might know as the mealy-mouthed, tarty host of Top Chef.

Midnight’s Children, like most of the books I teach, is one of my favorite books. It is narrated from the perspective of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on the same day India declared its independence from Britain on August 15, 1947. This coincidence endows him with magical, telepathic powers to communicate with the other “midnight’s children.” As he explains, “thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.” Saleem’s propitious birth is but one instance of his family’s intimate connection with world events. In fact, this connection goes far beyond mere correlation; the deeply personal generates the historical. His grandmother’s fury at her daughter’s unconsummated marriage explodes on the same day that the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, for example. Through this narrative conceit (conceit both as metaphor and as monomania), Rushdie weaves a remarkable tale that combines historical commentary with fantastic events.

Part and parcel of the novel is the historical mistake. Apparently, upon the novel’s publication, Rushdie received many letters regarding the factual inaccuracies in the novel, including his getting the year of Gandhi’s assassination wrong. In “Errata,” Rushdie remarks that the narrator does indeed comment on his own fallibility and his capacity for error. The errors are there in a deliberate attempt to undercut the narrator’s authority, but they also reflect the way that ordinary people experience historical events, in a personal and sometimes subjective way. For example, I could not give you offhand the exact month and day that the (first) Persian Gulf war began, and it would take a little number-crunching in my head to figure out the exact year. 1991? However, I do remember that my friends and I protested the war, while the water polo team hung up a huge sign over the school swimming pool with a slogan that went something like, “USA: Love it or Leave It.”

One interesting thing I noticed as I prepped for class, however, is that Rushdie did change at least one detail in 2006 edition of the book, which originally appeared in 1980. The scene is the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. In the 1910s, Gandhi’s nationalism movement was gaining steam. The British passed the Rowlatt Acts in 1919 in an attempt to curtail Indian rights. Among the many protests was one at Jallianwalla Bagh, a kind of field area in Amritsar, a town located in the Punjab region in northern India. On April 13, Indians gathered for a peaceful protest at Jallianwalla Bagh. General Dyer surrounded the Indians with a “native” regiment, a regiment in the British army composed of Indian soldiers, many of whom were Sikhs. He ordered them to fire indiscriminately on the crowd; about 500 were killed, a thousand wounded. The massacre sparked an international outcry and Dyer’s actions were condemned by Parliament.

Here is how Rushdie originally described Dyer’s entrance: “Aziz [Saleem’s grandfather] penetrates the heart of the crowd, as Brigadier R. E. Dyer arrives at the entrance to the alleyway, followed by fifty white troops.”

As I mentioned above, the troops were actually Indians. In the 2006 edition, Rushdie “corrects” his error: “Aziz penetrates the heart of the crowd, as Brigadier R. E. Dyer arrives at the entrance to the alleyway, followed by fifty crack troops” (my italics).

The revision of course does away with the whole racial angle played up by identifying the troops as “white.” Instead, they are now “crack” troops, that is, elite or expert troops. But I placed quotes around “corrects” because the change is not so much a correction as a modification. The “crack” actually points to the crack in the narrative, the original error or mistake. It is a crack that breaks up the unity of the book, because there are now two novels called Midnight’s Children.

This point is not far-fetched. For one, it is obvious to anyone who reads the book or reads the 2006 preface, where Rushdie shares a couple of slogans from his advertising days in the 1970s, that the writing is very punny, pun-soaked and pun-drunk. The novel (in either incarnation) invites the reader to join in the play.

For another, cracking up is a major theme in the novel. This is no Bildungsroman but an Unbildungsroman (not sure if I’ve got German right here), the story of a narrator’s breaking apart in a very literal way: “I am literally disintegrating…I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious dust.” The narrator’s body is disintegrating, cracks are opening up all over his skin, but he is also literally disintegrating, disintegrating into the many millions of letters that make up the novel’s prose. A decomposition in composition, if you will.

The disintegration of the narrator’s body, the unravelling of his life, is also an allegory for the historical trauma of Indian independence, which cannot be thought apart from Partition, the division of the sub-continent into India and Pakistan (which was later further broken up into present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh). Muslim and Hindu nationalist movements were uneasy allies at best during the years leading up to Partition. In a concession to the Muslim minority (then almost a 1/3 of the population, Hindus were almost 2/3, and Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and others made up the parts of the population not covered by “almost”), the British agreed to the partition of the subcontinent. Chaos ensued, as Muslims and Hindus, especially in the northern border areas, tried to escape both Muslim and Hindu violence. A million people died during these years, and of course, animosity between India and Pakistan continues to the present day over nuclear arms and territorial disputes in Kashmir.

The “crack” in the passage I cited above, then, is a critique of these splintering, exclusivist, divisive nationalisms. That is, Rushdie criticizes the desire for a myth of national origin, whether it be Muslim nostalgia for the Mughal empire or the assertion of Hindu as the one syncretic faith of India. Just as there is no one Midnight’s Children, there is no one Indian national identity. Nations are heterogenous and fuzzy things, and their histories testify to a process of “blurring and mixing,” as one historian puts it, of errancy and deviation. It is impossible to do justice to Rushdie’s vision here, but let me just say that the novel is a remarkable attempt, an epic attempt, to embrace the experiences of all of the heterogenous groups that make up the South Asian subcontinent.

Cracking up, then, into millions of letters. Cracking up, in the sense of losing one’s mind, but also cracking up, in the sense of uncontrollable laughter (this is a very funny book). I hope you enjoy the book as much as I do.

Take two

Don’t you hate it when you’re typing something up on e-mail or this blog thing or whatever and you somehow lose your internet connection and it all disappears and then you have to try to remember what you said?

Here we go again.

I thought I would try to type something up from the books I’m discussing for my class, “Global Modernism.” Here is the book list:

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Samuel Beckett, Murphy

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Tsisi Tangarembga, Nervous Conditions

Because my class is composed largely of freshmen, our class discussions are not at all theoretical. I do have to keep tying the text to “real life experiences” to help my students relate to the text (hence the tone and style of the blog entry).

(There are also a number of secondary readings as well. Will post as we go.)

First up was the Forster. Briefly, for those of you who haven’t read the book or seen the movie, the book takes place sometime between 1912-1921 in British India. An Englishwoman accuses a Muslim Indian man of raping her, but as she is giving her testimony at his trial, she realizes that she has made a terrible mistake and recants. The novel also investigates the complexities of social interactions within British Indian society, from the range of racial attitudes in Anglo-Indian administrators to the heterogenous religions, classes, and castes that make up Indian society.

Forster, I like to tell my students, is the hippie of the Modernist bunch. The declaration that “God is love” takes various permutations throughout the novel; its final form is misspelled on a poster during a Hindu festival as “God…si…love.” Because the novel does foreground social relationships so much, one of the most common discussion topics for the novel is the theme of friendship. In an effort to push my students away from sappy adolescent paeans to universal love (as well as from the SparkNotes/Wikipedia reading of the novel, barf) I brought in the excerpt above from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals (if you click on the image, it should expand).

Kant, as my students were quick to realize, has a rather paranoid definition of friendship: true friends are able to keep each others’ secrets. We don’t normally think of secrecy as the primary attribute of our truest friends; a lot of other attributes such as common interests or shared background come to mind first. But the Kant exposition of friendship is interesting for two reasons:

1) First off, Kant draws our attention to the way that our conduct in the public sphere (the world of politics and civil society) can condition our conduct in the private. Certainly there is a relevant biographical context. The excerpt is from a later period in his life when, just as he is finally prepared to take on the topic of religion after writing copious Critiques, he faces censorship from the Prussian government. Many of his later religious and political writings were only circulated around his closest friends and colleagues; it would have been disastrous if these writings were discovered by the censors. (I’m not sure what prison was like in Konigsberg, but I’ll put my money on cold, damp, and old gray herrings.) Turning to Forster’s novel, we can see how the public conditions one’s behavior in the private. Practically speaking, the Indians in the novel cannot express dissent, even to sympathetic Anglo-Indians (the British in India), without fear of reprisal. And indeed, without true political equity, friendship is impossible between the characters, even with the most promising friendship in the book, that between Fielding, the British college administrator and a generally enlightened character, and Dr. Aziz, a cosmopolitan Muslim Indian.

2) Yet I think there is another way to read the function of the secret. When we think about our friends (so our class discussion goes), it is impossible to encapsulate exactly why we are friends. Each friendship, or so I like to think, is unique and singular, and thus will always in some way escape expression; the essence of friendship is both incommunicable and incommunicability. (Much of what I’m writing I hope is intuitive; I don’t think I’m making an overly theoretical point, but I have been influenced here by Derrida’s Politics of Friendship.) Perhaps the real secret that is maintained between true friends is the fact of friendship, the experience of friendship, this singular relationship that is incomparable to anything else. Furthermore, it seems to me that in addition to seeing how the public conditions the private, we can also see how the private can condition the public. This is where the hippie part of Forster comes in: the idea of the politically transformative potential of true friendship. Rather than attempting to make others (or coerce others) to be like ourselves, perhaps we can learn, from this very basic experience of friendship, to respect others in all of their unfathomable difference.

Many of my students took a very simplistic reading of the last chapter of the novel. Since I’m writing from memory here, sorry about some vagueness. In the last chapter, Fielding and Aziz are taking a ride together in the jungle, and Aziz expresses his wish that the English leave India. They wonder if they will ever be friends. The last lines of the novel run something like “The sky said, ‘No, not yet,’ the earth said, ‘no, not here.’” The students all read the last line as being Forster’s definitive statement on the impossibility of friendship between the races. On the other hand, the first words of the chapter are “Friends again.” It is the narrator who says so, not the sky or the earth, so it seems to me we should take this phrase seriously. How can Forster claim that these two are “friends again” at the same time that they are “not yet” friends? I think the emphasis should be “friends again.” That is, we don’t think of our friendships as static entities, but as dynamic ones that continue to evolve and grow, not necessarily along the same paths but always somehow inexplicably intertwined. That’s part of the thrill and surprise of true friendships – growing together. I prefer to think that Forster was trying to avoid defining friendship so that true, original, singular friendship might be possible. Don’t get me wrong – there are many frankly racist moments in the book, and ultimately I do think the book takes the very paternalistic view that Indians are fundamentally immature and unprepared for modern government. But I think that insight into friendship – “friends again” – is what makes Forster’s A Passage to India such an interesting text for me.

So, “God…si…love,” my friends. Rushdie is next.

houllebecquerie

I guess we should have called our blog "Hegemony." Or just "hegemon." Which sounds like the name of a Transformer.

Anyhoo, thanks to Staci and Jon for keeping us on track. Below is a presentation I did on Houllebecq's Platform for a seminar on Francophone literature. Feel free not to read this until after you read Houellebecq -- in fact, it's probably better that way. You might end up considering the whole piece a waste of time, but not unentertaining. Here's what I'll do -- I'll bury the presentation in a comment to this post, and if you want to read it, you can.

Is anyone interested in reading Niall Ferguson on Empire? (British Harvard historian w/joint appointment in business school.) Although I disagree with what I've read of him, and I find his "longue duree" approach to history annoying, he is one of the big historians of the day and I feel like I should know what he's all about. I'm sure Alex can correct me on this. It might be a nice counterpart to the Said novel Staci suggested. Also, Jon recommended a book on math to me a while ago (for non-mathematicians, more cognitive-y) -- that might be cool as well. This is all heavy-hitting stuff, so I'm also up for a children's book month, mainly to get everyone to read, love, and cry over Philip Pullman.

If anyone is interested, here is what's on current (dissertation) reading list. In fact, I'd love to hear what you all are reading as well.
-- Beckett's Trilogy (now out in a new edition w/intro by Coetzee and Rushdie, among others)
-- Woolf's The Years (and The Pargiters, the accompaniment to The Years), Orlando, Three Guineas; Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf
-- Coetzee's The Lives of Animals
-- and a bunch of lit theory that no one else is probably interested in.

the man who put the freak in freakanomics

Hope everyone's displacements are going well -- I dug up a few priceless words from EB White on Thoreau as I sit here in Concord preparing a class on Thoreau. Phew, that was a mouthful. Speaking of mouthfuls ...

"There is a woodchuck here, living forty feet away under the wharf. When the wind is right, he can smell my house; and when the wind is contrary, I can smell his. We both use the wharf for sunning, taking turns, each adjusting his schedule to the other's convenience. Thoreau once ate a woodchuck. I think he felt he owed it to his readers, and that it was little enough, considering the indignities they were suffering at his hands and the dressing-down they were taking. (Parts of "Walden" are pure scold.) Or perhaps he ate the woodchuck because he believed every man should acquire strict business habits, and the woodchuck was destroying his market beans. I do not know. Thoreau had a strong experimental streak in him. It is probably no harder to eat a woodchuck than to construct a sentence that lasts a hundred years. At any rate, Thoreau is the only writer I know who prepared himself for his great ordeal by eating a woodchuck; also the only one who got a hangover from drinking too much water.

Here in this compact house where I would spend one day as deliberately as Nature if I were not being pressed by The Yale Review, and with a woodchuck (as yet uneaten) for neighbor, I can feel the companionship of the occupant of the pondside cabin in Walden woods, a mile from the village, near the Fitchburg right of way."

thus spaketh hegemonically

Hey, I'm going to pull a hegemon here. Given my conversations over telephone and e-mail with some of you, it seems there's interest in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Freakanomics for our September selection. Since most of us are in transit this month (switching houses, apartments, states, whole states of mind), and to simplify the whole book-buying thing while we're in transit, I say let's stick with these two for September. Suggestions for October readings can be posted in the middle of September.

Looking forward to your posts,
Jeannie

Ghost Wars

Hi, everybody, I thought I would start off the post on Ghost Wars. I did skip the hundred pages in the middle so that I could find out what happened in the years leading up to 9/11, but I wanted to get these questions on paper before I obsessed about them anymore.

One of the books that I had to read for my orals was a book by David Trotter on the social and historical context of the British novel between 1880-1918. He had an entire chapter devoted to the "secret agent." We're not talking just Joseph Conrad, but a line from Charles Dickens' The Tale of Two Cities, where the terrorists were the French (the origin of the moniker "terrorist") through John Buchan's novels, where shiny young elite British men in exotic locales "fell" into the spy business, which really only began around that time. This is also the time when Decadence flourished and Bram Stoker's Dracula was a best-seller, and the spy novel shared the same pre-occupation with shadowy mobile populations contaminating the core of civilization, a contamination that could only be cleansed through superior British morality. This theme corresponded to the feeling that with the evolution of a public sphere, with varying degrees of democracy, you lost the complete transparency of politics under a monarchy and had to deal with unpredictable demographic agencies that had to be moralized out of their irrational, primitivist, anarchist impulses. The civilizing mission at home. So the spy didn't need any particular training; you had the "gentleman spy." On the other hand, those unpredictable demographic agencies would have self-destructed anyway -- the gentleman spy just eased that process along.

What I was struck by in reading Ghost Wars, from a completely non-specialist point of view, was how similar the current situation was to that earlier time. Since Coll is a journalist and not a political scientist, I was not expecting any prescriptive statements to come out of the book, but I kind of wish they had -- I just couldn't sleep while I was reading this book. Ghost Wars gives us a vivid portrait of the personalities behind the US efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in particular through the CIA, but what was eye-opening to me was that the decisions that were made were not based on intelligence but on personalities. Most of the CIA agents who were based in Pakistan put a lot of misplaced trust in the Pakistani secret service, their "relationships" with individual generals -- I say "most" because Coll also gives us the views of the CIA agents who had clandestinely investigated the Afghan situation for themselves and disagreed with the official CIA policy. The book also gives the impression that the CIA culture itself is strongly prejudiced against people from the Northeast who are viewed as cerebral and liberal and not serious enough for the business of war, and that the CIA preferred cowboys in the agency and in Congress. It seems that could only hurt them, and more importantly, hurt us as a country.

One of the key advantages of the CIA that comes through in the book is its enormous flexibility, at least in comparison with the military. I'm thinking of the example that they give of the Predator drone experiment. This flexibility is what makes it adaptable to the post-Cold War situation. But on the other hand, in order to be flexible and innovative, the agency needed more discretionary income, so to speak, and the freedom to use it as needed without bureaucracy. I would be more in favor of this increased flexibility if I didn't know about all those personalities and prejudices Coll outlined within the agency. That pesky bureaucracy is in place so that the government can be held accountable for what it does, and I should hope that's what distinguishes us as a democracy. Is democracy a transparent representation of the people? Is democracy compatible with this "ghost war" that compels our engagement?

One of the strongest features of the book was that it illustrated all of the different Islams and Arabic identities that come into play. It showed how the US missed the boat by not being able to support more secular tendencies in the Middle East and by virtually throwing huge volumes of weapons into the world market. It also gives the lie to Samuel Huntington's idiotic Clash of the Civilizations argument.

So, again, this book was fascinating and stirred up all kinds of questions. I'm looking forward to hearing what you thought about the book.