Ulysses, Mentally Revised

For some reason, I decided that I needed to know which word Joyce used to describe the nature of Leopold Bloom's fondness for the "tang" of urine in cooked kidneys--"savoured"? "relished"? "liked"?--so I pulled down the Ulysses I used for a grad class on Joyce several years ago. The sentence wasn't where I expected to find it; I could have sworn it was the first line of Ulysses, but in fact the first line is:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. 

I'd assumed that people quoted that line so often because they liked the assonance/consonance in the first four words, but it turns out that it's significant for entirely different reasons: it's the one sentence that everyone who has tried to read Ulysses is guaranteed to have finished.

Apparently, I so dislike the character of Stephen Dedalus that I've mentally edited his role down and otherwise minimized his significance to the text. In preferring Leopold, I've mentally inserted Leopold into the book's starting position, so to speak. 

To give my fuzzy memory a little credit, although the tang-of-urine line doesn't begin the book, it does begin Part II ("The Wanderings"); however, I also misremembered the quotation as a single line, rather than as two separate statements in a brief paragraph. The actual sentences are:

Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.

And:

Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Also, the verbs are more delicate ("ate," "gave to his palate") and the description of the flavour is slightly more graphic than I remembered.

Overrall, the description exhibits a little more warmth than I usually associate with Joyce's renderings of Leopold's consciousness, but I kind of assume that the affection is for the organ meats rather than for Leopold.

Philip Larkin

I've never been a fan of poetry, given my (increasingly) limited patience with "opaque" language in general. (An impatience that also explains my difficulties with most of the literary theory texts I'm obliged to read.)

Philip Larkin is a rare poet to have piqued my interest, most likely because he pretty consistently works in accessible language.  The man himself seems to have had serious issues (* sigh *), but the poems don't bring the most deplorable of his issues to the forefront.

I think his work is sometimes characterized as sour; I'm struck more by the pervasive melancholy, and his speakers' frustration with their own cynicism, while also apparently feeling that such cynicism is the only way to cope with their circumstances and their insights into their own character. This Be The Verse is probably his most famous poem, possibly because the first line is startling--not because of the f-bomb (although that may have been a little shocking when the poem was first published), but by the bluntness of the opening sentiment, which is about as transparent as you can get, in poetry.

It's the first two lines of the last stanza that get to me:

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like the coastal shelf.

He's not talking about depression here, per se, but I suspect depression informed the image. So many people who've suffered from depression seem to opt for water imagery to describe it--not characterizing the experience as suffocation, but more of a sense of going under, amplified by the sensation of a vast immense sadness always waiting. Even when the water isn't yet closing over your head, it's still out there, deepening off the coastal shelf.

Difficult Writing

It struck me today that the writers I find particularly difficult tend to be a) Nineteenth Century American writers or b) Modernist women writers.

The second category is less of an issue for me, because I'm basing that opinion on a handful of texts--a Stein book here, an H.D. poem there, a Djuna Barnes book here. The most difficult poetry on my Field Exam was definitely the H.D. poems with the flower names--"Sea Poppies," "Sea Lillies," and "The Sheltered Garden." They are deceptively simple; when it came time to try to analyze those poems, or suggest something, anything about their meaning, my whole brain would freeze up. The novels by the female modernists strike me as much more aggressively experimental than many books by male novelists. There are a few exceptions to that rule--I would not try to argue that Joyce, for example, is not aggressively experimental--but I would argue that, as a group, the women modernists take more radical approaches to language and narrative in novels than your average male modernists. That does not mean I enjoy their work very much. I don't feel like Stein's novels reward the work I have to put into them. (Woolf's do; a stories, her books work better, for me.)

The other category is a much bigger pool, but it doesn't include every Nineteenth Century American author. I do struggle with most of the Big Name Authors--Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, the transcendentalists. When I look at that list, no particular shared characteristics of their writing leaps out at me. Something about the style Americans used to express themselves in literature in that century really, really does not entertain me, nonetheless.

Faulkner Covers

My Faulkner paperbacks tend to feature unsavoury cover images.

The editions that slap a nice harmless photograph of the author on the cover strike me as the most successful covers, aesthetically. Faulkner looks good and literary, with his sweater-and-suit outfits, his pipes, his dashing hair and moustaches. The off-putting Faulkner covers arise when designers attempt to illustrate the concepts or themes strongly associated with his work--the stagnant South, family secrets, racial tensions, fraught inheritances, etc. These are all excellent and worthy concepts, but "Southern Gothic" isn't something easily illustrated without being laughable. I own five Faulkner novels, and my editions of his books have uniformly bad covers. Faulkner's books seem to pose a particularly difficult challenge to book cover designers, however. Not many current editions of his books have covers that'll knock your socks off; many of Vintage's more recent trade paperback covers aren't much better than the ones on my crappy old mass-market paperbacks. In fact,the newer book cover for Sanctuary bites its concept from the 1970s-era Light in August pictured here.

The current Vintage cover series seems to have opted to illustrate the environmental Southernness of the books. These covers display window panes with condensation, massing storm clouds and lush Southern greenery, usually in a bruised yellow / purple colour palette that could be an indirect indication about the "sicknesses" that emerge in those settings. Someone clearly put some thought into how to indicate the books' contents while also developing visual themes usable on all of the Faulkner books, regardless of the indivual text's content. As a result, on the one hand, the storm cloud cover for The Sound and the Fury seems to indicate that the designers asked themselves "What is the easiest way to illustrate that title?" and called it a day. On the other hand, the cover for Go Down, Moses is appealing and historically specific in ways that work much better than some of the vague, "atmospherically" Southern imagery. (After a quick search, I found that Eudora Welty took that photo, I'm guessing during her stint with the WPA, which means that the photo probably shows a scene more or less contemporaneous with Faulkner's writing).

My books' covers, pictured above, are for editions issued over a range of decades (as far as I can tell--the dating is imprecise in some of the older mass market paperbacks). The Sound and the Fury cover is from the 1950s, the Sartoris from the 1960s, the Light in August from the 1970s, and the As I Lay Dying from the 1980s. Only the Sartoris is a non-Vintage edition. The problem with most of these is not so much the design concepts, but the bad art plugged into those designs. The cover concept for Sartoris is fine, but the smudgy execution is not so hot. As I Lay Dying is cartoony and lurid, which isn't exactly incompatible with Faulkner's literary aesthetics, I guess, but it doesn't make me want to read the story that image illustrates. The Sound and the Fury cover makes more sense after you've read the book. However, at first glance, I thought it illustrated mis-matched convicts escaped from prison and fleeing the law while still shackled together. The cover colour is also awful. My Light in August has an okay cover that is actually more clever than I realized at first glance--it's the old condensation-on-the-window-pane image, but shot at an angle that makes the blind pull also suggestive of the gallows. However, the image in and of itself is kind of boring.

Nonetheless, it's better than this: I really don't understand what sold this cover aesthetic to the people at Vintage.

A tangential point: when it comes to Southern Gothic, I prefer Flannery O'Connor to Faulkner. I don't see her books as often, though, so I don't have the impression that her covers are doing a disservice to her books. Nonetheless, given her eschatological / Catholic apocalypticism, I'd expect more Christian-style iconography on her books; however, beyond the occasional patterned cross, the more dominant imagery for her book covers tends to be bird imagery (birds and peacock feathers). That more specific unifying imagery seems better than the rather generic imagery of "the South" used on the covers of Faulkner's books.

Anthony Trollope: The Way We Live Now

Anthony Trollope always comes up in a discussion of the nineteenth century novelists, but he seems to be a second-tier writer, maybe because he was so dauntingly prolific, having produced a novel or five every year, from the late 1840s to the early 1880s.

I'm exaggerating, but only a little bit. He really hit his stride in the mid-1850s, when he began churning them out like clockwork. And he did publish five books in 1882, but that number includes three novels, a biography, and a short story collection. Typically, he published between 1 to 3 books a year, and that does add up over the course of a thirty year career, and is all the more astounding because the man had a day job at the post office. (I hear he was responsible for an iconic post box colour/design used throughout England.)

Trollope's The Way We Live Now may seem inaccessible at first because it looks like a typical Victorian door stop. I quite liked it, though. What really struck me, after reading a similarly mammoth Dickens novel (Our Mutual Friend) was that Trollope doesn't contrive the hell out of his plot the way that Dickens does. There were coincidences, maybe, but a lot of them are attributable to the characters living in the same places or running in the same circles, and none of them were outrageous, or required a sudden abandonment of a long-established characterization. The narrator was much more snide than the typical Dickens narrator, and Trollope's book has characters that aren't out and out villains, but are just kind of worthless and irritating.

Recommended if you are interested in: Victorian satire, the Victorian financial world, Victorian perspectives on America, multi-family sagas, newspaper publishing in the mid-nineteenth century, country life vs. city life, low-level aristocracy, electioneering in Victorian England.

Brontë Suggestions

If you had to read just one book by just one of the Brontës, you have a choice of the following:

For Charlotte: Jane Eyre (1847); Shirley (1848); The Professor (1857); Villette (1853)

For Emily: Wuthering Heights (1847)

For Anne: Agnes Grey (1847); The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Charlotte’s Jane Eyre is probably the all-around best option if you can read only one of the seven books; its plot and themes have been the most influential in both fiction and in critical literature (e.g. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar). Jane Eyre is also probably the most accessible of the seven books. Jane is a sympathetic and relatively open protagonist, telling her story in a straightforward fashion (and in chronological order), without withholding very much information about the other characters or her state of mind.

Emily’s Wuthering Heights is probably the second-most influential of the seven; although it is less significant to literary criticism, it has a pretty significant pop cultural footprint. The interpretations of the characters and the central romance are problematic, though, and some new readers come away from the book wondering where anyone got History's Greatest Romance out of that material. More practically speaking, Wuthering Heights is going to confuse younger readers or people who just don't read very much. It was an option for the classic books we had to read independently when I was in eleventh grade, and most of the students who took a shot at reading it gave up after a few chapters, hopelessly confused by the flashback structure and all the Cathys and Lintons and Earnshaws.

Some people lurve this book and others hate it–or are too irritated with the characters to slog all the way through. I don’t love it, myself, but it also doesn’t irritate me very much, because I strongly feel that the Heathcliff the Romantic Hero is a weird mis-reading that isn’t really borne out in the content of the book. It is a capital-R Romantic novel (i.e. influenced by the ideology that inspired the poetic movement circa the turn of that century), but not a romance. I think the interpretations of the book, rather than the book's actual content, put off some new readers of the book, although the content is dramatic and overwrought at times, too. And all of the characters other than Catherine Earnshaw really are very stupid about Heathcliff throughout the novel, considering that he practically walks about with “Evil” embroidered on his clothes.

Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is not as interesting as a narrative, and I’m not sure if anyone other than a serious fan of Victorian novels would read it for pleasure any more (the material was a bit shocking / scandalous for the 1840s, although not at all in a lurid way). I didn’t choose it when I was putting together my Nineteenth century reading list, but if I were more invested in feminist readings and Victorian social issues in general (and especially issues related to marriage), it would have been a valuable text. Anne’s book seems much, much more typically Victorian than the books by her sisters; I would tend to use it more as a document of its age than as a significant literary work, although there are certainly literary elements of the book that bear examination, as well.

Of all of the books, I like Villette best. If someone liked Jane Eyre but had some issues with the ways Charlotte went about resolving that book, then Villette would be the book for that person; it lacks some of the more absurd contrivances of Jane Eyre, and will seem like a more plausible story to modern readers. It is also a potentially difficult book, because the first person narrator is not a very confiding narrator; plus, some readers will find the conclusion frustrating. Overall, it is a more accomplished novel than Jane Eyre, although it’s much less influential.

The other three books–The Professor, Shirley, and Agnes Grey–aren’t books I have read. I do know that The Professor was Charlotte’s first book, but was published posthumously, and thus is probably more important for a student or fan of Charlotte Brontë than for someone putting together an overview of Nineteenth century literature. I read a few pages of Shirley and had the impression that it was a bit of a departure from Charlotte’s other work, but I don’t know enough otherwise to argue for or against it. Agnes Grey might actually be Anne’s better-known book, but, again, I can’t speak to its virtues or defects, other than to say that Anne is the least necessary of the three for someone surveying the century, rather than working on the Brontës. She does gain some significance if the focus is on woman writers of the century, however; she may be more important, in literary terms, than someone like Mary Elizabeth Braddon. This is where my ignorance is showing–my knowledge of Victorian studies is pretty casual. For that reason, however, I can provide a very good index to the works you need to know to survey the century or discuss the Victorian influence: I only know the Big Names.