"Jane Eyre" Charlotte Bronte

This is the story of a girl with a grudge, a woman with a chip on her shoulder. This is what happens.

A maladjusted orphan girl is taken in by some kind relatives. She terrorizes the other children in the family and never responds to disciplinary treatment. She is so badly behaved that eventually she is sent away to school, where her behaviour only gradually improves after she is 'broken in' by the headmaster.
While at the school she is directly responsible for the death of her best friend by callously omiting to alert the authorities that her friend is suffering from TB. This notwithstanding, she manages to fool the authorities into offering her a place later as a teacher at the school, where she continues to molest the girls and tyranize the staff.
After two years of this, our manipulative and scheming heroine realise that if she is to enjoy financial security, she needs to find a rich husband, so she embarks on a career change as governess, which is one of the few avenues of work open to short ugly women with no relatives. She strikes it lucky with her first job, as governess to the ward of a very handsome -and very rich- man. She uses all her wiles to make the man fall in love with her, seeing off other competitors successfully, until the man wearily gives in and agrees to marry her. Unfortunately, on their wedding day, he jilts her at the alter because, it appears, he is already married to a mad woman locked up in the attic of his huge stately mansion.
Jane, seething with rage and malice, never forgives her suitor, and vows revenge on him and on all men whatever the cost. She dedicates her life to this evil purpose.
She soon moves on and takes up with another family of good people, where she sticks her claws into the brother, St John. He is a good man, a devout man, a man of God, and she easily uses his naivety to make him fall in love with her. She ruthlessly leads him on and then spurns him when he proposes to her. During this time, Jane comes into an inheritance and achieves financial independence. She doesn't tell her new friends about this, even though she finds out that they are her cousins (wow, cousins! amazing coincidence, huh?)
When St John proposes to marry her and take her off to the colonies to help him convert brown and black people to the way of the Lord, she considers her options. The offer is tempting, but she still has her sights set on one thing only: revenge. Also, she realises that it will be more satisfying to be mistress of Rochester's fortune, where there will lots of servants she can tyrannise, rather than being a missionary's wife, where she will be just a big fish in a small pond. She decides to aim for a higher social position, turns him down, and breaks his heart. One more man ruined.
She returns to Rochester's place in the dead of night to accomplish her wicked plan. She sets fire to the house (having already ascertained that it's insured to the hilt) and blames the fire on the poor innocent mad woman in the attic, who, conveniently, has perished in the flames. Also, Rochester loses a hand and his sight in the fire, which is perfect, because there’s nothing like a disability to make a man dependent on a woman, especially blindness. Jane establishes emotional control over this tragic, broken man, forces him to marry her in his weakest moment, and makes sure that he never re-establishes his independence by immediately giving birth to a child and by making sure that no one ever comes near him again.
Her plot complete, her revenge satisfied, she lives happily ever after, a splendid example of what short ugly women called Jane can achieve if they really put their minds to it.

Outrageous? Absurd? Far-fetched?

Perhaps. But consider this for a moment. Jane’s story is told to us by Jane herself. We have only her word for it. One of the problems with first person narratives of this kind is that there is no other view point, nothing to give us a check on whether the narrator is telling the truth. Of course the Modernists realized this and exploited it, most notoriously, Ford Maddox Ford in The Good Soldier, but might not Jane Eyre be the first example of an unreliable, in fact a fundamentally dishonest narrator? After all, she knows her whole story and how it will end from the beginning, and this information she withholds from us. She must lie, or at least be economical with the truth, or at least be selective about what parts of her story she reveals to the reader and when, otherwise how can she build suspense? And if she withholds these things from us, who’s to say that she might not be withholding other things from us as well, or even distorting them in order to make her motives and actions appear better than they are, in order perhaps to justify herself to the reader, and to win the reader's admiration, or sympathy? Why should we trust her? Because she appears honest? Because she wears the style of honesty on her sleeve?

I have never liked the narrator of this novel. I find she protests too much, she is in thrall to a kind of Puritanism, an ascetic version of Christianity which is deeply repellant, and I find her constant attitude of forgiveness both trying and unbelievable. She has not fooled Murr!

Spurious Quotation #5

The meek shall not inherit the earth. They shall be fucked over and fucked out.
The Dead Sea Scrolls

"Bleak House" Charles Dickens

The great mystery of this book is the double narrative, an innovation for Dickens. One told in the 1st person past simple, and the other told in the 3rd person present simple, a double distancing, not only in voice, but also in tense. One's initial reaction is that Dickens began in the present simple because he wanted to aim for the timeless immediacy of a sketch in this condition-of-England novel, but then realised that it was going to be difficult to sustain it over a whole novel, and so introduced a more conventional narrative voice.
However, there must be something else going on here. He had already used a sustained interiority in David Copperfield, and was to do so later again in its mirror, Great Expectations, but in this book he combined the interiority of consciousness with a reporter’s eye for detail. It’s tempting to read the use of this double narrative as an investigation of the place of the individual within the historical process, the relation between the private and the public, the National and the Domestic, as one of the chapter headings signals.

The first voice we encounter is the impersonal 3rd person singular, present simple, or the no-time tense. This gives the writing a timelessness, a static quality, and also an immediacy. This is not a historical moment, but the timeless world of myth or fairy tale. The London we encounter here is not the jaunty London of the Sketches, but something altogether more sinister, shrouded in darkness and fog and diseases, a site of murder, spontaneous combustion, extortion, blackmail and suicide.
The writing is marvelously strange, with an opening paragraph of extreme conciseness, impressionistic in detail, with no verbs or main clauses, relying on gerunds and subordinate clauses to give it life and movement.
This voice frequently employs this kind of strange impressionistic writing. In the chapter immediately following the spontaneous combustion, the opening paragraph is marked by inversion and repetition: Now do those two gentlemen…… now do they note down…Now do they set forth, now do they show…how this account, with a simple clause coming only at the end of the paragraph: All this and more…..the two gentlemen write down. The sentences here are marked by extreme length and complexity, with interruptions from many subordinate clauses. These two chapters mark the high point of this narrative technique and contain some of the finest prose Dickens ever wrote.
It’s this voice that describes the condition of England: moribund, static, petrified, paralyzed. The plot strands that belong exclusively to this voice are the Dedlock family, the spontaneous combustion, Tulkinghorn’s murder, the minor plots of the Snagsbys and the Chadbands.

The second voice is the voice of Esther. This voice is in the personal, 1st person, past simple. The character is looking back and reporting events and her reaction to them. This is not as simple or as straight-forward as it seems, for it appears that Esther is as great a genius at constructing narrative as Dickens himself, and as great in writing discourse. Of course, Esther knows the end of the story as she writes the beginning of it, and her withholding of detail to create suspense and to show an unfolding consciousness of her own character and her position in the world is one of the characteristics of the bildungsroman. Not to mention her awareness of an implied reader, who also has access to the other voice. The plot strands that belong exclusively to this voice are the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, Richard’s downfall and death. This voice is concerned with the domestic.

Although the two narrative voices are distinct and separate and describe two distinguishable worlds, there is no clear division between the different realms and the concerns assigned to them. The narrative switches unpredictably between the voices, and the reader is just getting used to one voice, when it is interrupted by the other. There are also numerous places where the events the voices describe, and the characters they draw, intersect. In fact, one of the themes of the book as enacted by its structure is the interconnectedness of everybody. Dombey and Son (1846- 48) marks a division in Dickens’s work between the earlier novels written on the hoof, as it were, in which the plot unfolds improvisationally according to the demands of the installments, and the later ones in which the plot is carefully thought out and more attention appears to have been given to the overall structural design from the beginning. The earlier Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), for example, veers off in a completely unforeseen direction when Martin junior goes off to America, a decision made by Dickens to try to boost popularity of the work. It is also marked by thumping coincidences to help the story come together as a plot. Bleak House (1853-54), has no such coincidences. Every character in the novel is related to one or both of the plot strands, there are no minor or incidental characters, and everyone is connected to everyone else, in a kind of mid-Victorian Six Degrees of Separation. It’s possible as an experiment to imagine taking away one of the named characters in the book, and see how the plot falls apart. In his pre-Dombey books, some characters are surplus to requirements, and removing them does not result in the disintegration of the plot. In nothing in Dickens’s career so far had this much attention been given to the underlying pattern. The first named character in the book whose name is voiced by another character is Mr. Tangle. While this is of course a metaphor for the law, it is also a metaphor for the underlying structure and intention of the book, to show that the inhabitants of the city are not as disconnected as they might feel; to show that we are all connected to each other in ways that we cannot know.
In spite of her scorn for Dickens’s methods, George Eliot used the same design and intention in her 1873 masterpiece, Middlemarch, in which images of webs abound.

Inadvertent Obscenity #2

The three boys sallied out; the Dodger with his coat sleeves tucked up, and his hat cocked as usual; Master Bates sauntering along with his hands in his pockets; and Oliver between them, wondering where they were going...

Charles Dickens Oliver Twist

Spurious Quotation # 4

There's nothing more alluring, more mysterious and more expressive of the nature of our existence than a big man in a frock.
Ernest Hemingway.

Francis Bacon on friendship

A man cannot speak to his son but as a father; to his wife but as a husband; to his enemy but upon terms: whereas a friend may speak as the case requires and not as it sorteth with the person.

Fragment 214

Academic Grafitti
(with apologies to Uncle Wiz)





Thomas Ruggles Pynchon
Hasn't got an inch on
Slothrop's hard on.
I beg your pardon!

* * *

Iris Murdoch
Ate some burdoch
And went to bed
With a sore head.

* * *

The American Saul Bellow
Was a jolly good fellow.
Unlike his compatriots
Who are mostly bloody idiots.

* * *

Charles Dickens
Didn't leave much pickins
For writers who came arter,
The dirty blarter.

E.M. Forster on the importance of spontaneity

Those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.

Inadvertent obscenity #1

She touched his organ, and from that bright epoch, even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a new and deified existence.

Charles Dickens Martin Chuzzlewit

Fragment 216

Auden Centenery


It is all there.
The ruined factories
Deserted railway lines
And Prospero crying in the garden.
The spies, the tyrants, the lovers and the sick
All in your poetry have found their niche
And are regarded with the cool compassion
Of the Master of his craft.

Your monument stands
A tower of Babel, but unlike
That earlier construction
The body of your opus breathes
And is united by
In easy homogeneity
The vigour of your intellect
The baroque restraint of your control.

Once in the library at seventeen
I read your Lullaby and gaped:
It changed the tenor of my life.
And in my adolescent wonderings
It challenged me. And now I know
How every line of verse you wrote
In lines of experience etched their course
So deep into your face.

The facts of your life
I learnt by heart. And then
There were the dormant years
When your writings took a second place
As I went wandering in fields of words
Not yours. But recently
You have assumed a constancy
Not there before.

By grey sea's edge, in city's dreck,
Whatever I am doing, I've only now
To turn to you to ease my temporary stress.
If we had met, would we've got on?
Would you have muttered an incomprehensible
And turned away? Or would we both
Have sat in shade and drunk
In mute companionship?

Spurious Quotation #3

I am Nijinsky.
God

Fragment 109

Looking at a book on Callas in the bookshop. She was a diva and an icon: of femininity, of the 50s and 60s, of opera, of art, of glamour, of Greece, of the determination to succeed. She had an indomitable will, which she was to a certain extent a slave to. She willed herself to be the greatest soprano in the world with an instrument that was unwieldy and at times unkind. She willed herself to die after Onassis’s death. It took time, but she succeeded in the end, just as she succeeded in everything else.
The reason why she was the greatest opera singer that ever was or will be is tied up with the fact that she was Greek, and as such, was able to tap into the roots of opera, which go right back, through Monteverdi, to the ancient Greek tragedies. Aeschylus Sophocles Euripides. She had a commitment to the singing and the drama that borders on the terrible: we watch her in horrified fascination.
In an era of not inconsiderable talent, she made everyone else look like louche lounge singers.

Dostoevsky on the nature of Man

Man is distinguished from the animals by his ability to curse.

"The Piano Tuner" Daniel Mason

This book occupies an interesting place across two genres, one old, one new, both expressions of contemporary concern: 19th century imperialism and 20th century science book, one spawned by Heart of Darkness, one spawned by Dava Sobel’s Longitude. Mason’s story of a piano tuner sent by the war office to upper Burma to tune a piano in the late 19th century also has echoes of Herzog’s mad movie Fitzcarraldo, and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Despite some stunningly surreal images, however - a grand piano lashed to a raft careering down some tropical rapids deep in the middle of the jungle, fired at from all sides by hostile and unseen savages- as the novel begins and ends with the death of the principle character, it will never make it to the big screen. We learn a lot about Erard pianos and piano tuning, a potentially mind numbing subject made fascinating here, as Sobel made navigation interesting; and the tuner’s meeting in the war office is a distinct homage to the opening of Heart.

Mason’s story is about how music has the potential to create peace and understanding, about the meeting of East and West, the arts of peace and the arts of war, loyalty and betrayal and cultural misunderstanding. Readable, despite vast tracts of (authentic?) secondary material describing in detail the lore, geography of Burma and the history of the three Burmese wars supposedly provided by contemporary authorities on the country. (Mason spent time in Burma researching malaria, and these passages seem to have been rejected from his Harvard thesis and included here as padding.)

Mason seems to be good at describing the place, and we can certainly imagine ourselves in Burma and London of the late 19 century. But is capturing the spirit of place really such an original accomplishment, after Durrell showed us all how to do it? Mason’s prose is often lumpy and his grammar worse. The first sentence is one of the most appalling mishmashes of tenses in contemporary fiction. The characters are sketchy and do not really come alive.

If every novel is structured around a kernel event, one from which all the other incidents and descriptions radiate and take their meaning in the pattern, then the greatness of any book, the skill, the honesty of any writer may be to some extent measured by the strength of the kernel as an image, by the way the kernel brings together various strands and themes of the book, and by the weight of the balance between the kernel and the rest of the piece, how the kernel illuminates other incidents.
Henry James taught Forster the secret of how to add weight to this kernel: ambiguate it. All of great James revolves around a kernel of something unmentionable, and therefore unnamable and unknowable: The Turn of the Screw, The Beast in the Jungle, Portrait of a Lady, the Aspern Papers etc. Forster uses the same device in his masterpiece Passage to India , where he actually removed all the concrete evidence of the rape and left a gaping black hole at the center of the novel, symbolized by the maddening echo in the black cave of the Marabur Hills.
The kernel event in this book is the night scene when the tuner is pressured to play the newly tuned Erard at a tense and dangerous midnight pow-wow between the British district commander and the fractious leaders of the warring Burmese tribes. Here, like most novelists who make music their subject, Mason falls flat (no pun intended). The tuner’s chosen piece for this midnight concert is the 24 Preludes and Fugues by Bach, which, despite his anxious protestations that he is not a pianist, only a tuner and cannot really play, and that after his months-long trek across the globe with no instrument to practice on, he performs in its entirety, from memory, the first book only (!). And here I found myself grimacing in embarrassment.

This choice of repertoire fits nicely with the theme of tuning, and we learn a lot about the technology of tempered tuning and the basis of Western harmony (very well explained by a layman for lay readers), of the aesthetic distortion inherent in the circle of fifths, and in the gap between the ideal and the real; it brings together nicely the two journeys, the one made by the piano, and the one made by the tuner, gives them, and all the intertextual documentation purpose. Thematically then and structurally, this choice makes sense. However, to play the 24 from memory in one sitting is a gigantic intellectual, artistic, and technical accomplishment, one that would have had the tuner practicing for years, on a daily basis for hours and hours, and nowhere has it been given to us that the tuner has done this, or is capable of it. Preparation for an achievement of this order would have occupied an enormous space in the protagonist’s consciousness. The fact that it doesn’t seriously mars the book’s integrity, and its design.

Mason either doesn’t realize this, or hopes that the reader won’t realize it. In this he is either incompetent to write about music, and shouldn't have, or he is dishonest with his readers. Either way, this presents a fatal flaw from which the book doesn’t recover as a work of art. As a thesis on the 19th century history of Burma, and the mechanics and history of piano tuning and technology, however, it’s fascinating.

Spurious Quotation #2

Exaggeration is more interesting than mediocrity.
W.D.Howells