The Little Professor

Winterwood

The historical novel owes much to the Gothic, and frequently shades into it--as is the case with Patrick McCabe's terse and, quite frankly, often repulsive Winterwood.  (Although there's almost nothing graphic in the novel--the nastiest stuff all occurs off-page--the narrator is nasty enough that some readers may wish to spend their time in different company.) Covering approximately a quarter-century of modern Irish history, Winterwood uses its Gothic trappings to turn the relationship between past and present into a singularly claustrophobic nightmare of insane nostalgia, misogyny, perversion, and all-around general ugliness.

Winterwood's first-person narrator, Redmond Hatch (among other names), is an even less pleasant version of Patrick McGrath's shattered speakers.    The very unreliable Redmond narrates in fits and starts, frequently trying to repress the signs of his own physical and linguistic violence; sometimes he intentionally or unintentionally fills in the gaps, while at other times the reader is left to draw  her own conclusions.  Redmond, we learn, comes from a long line of deeply-inbred "mountainers," who lived near a small town called Slievenagheeha.  His mental collapse begins after he returns there for the first time, where he encounters a fiddler and raconteur named Ned Strange--who, it transpires, claims to know a great deal about Redmond's late father, his late Uncle Florian, and Redmond itself.  Redmond's mother died mysteriously, either in church (official version) or beaten to death by Redmond's father (Ned's version); as we eventually discover, Redmond was shipped off to a convent orphanage, where the nuns, enchanted by Uncle Florian's fiddle-playing, fail (or refuse) to realize that Florian is a sexual predator.  While Redmond's celebratory write-ups of Ned Strange make him into a local celebrity, they also give him more access to children.  Unfortunately, Ned is also a sexual predator, who eventually commits suicide in prison after raping and murdering a small boy.  And Redmond, who has his own serious problems with women, finds himself haunted by Ned Strange...

As McCabe structures his narrative, "old" Ireland is effectively undead.  Ned Strange grows popular with the locals precisely because they think of him as an anachronistic curiosity, a remnant of an idealized, lost tradition: "I interviewed a few of the mothers and they told me that as far as they were concerned having characters like Ned in the community was a great way for their children to find out about an Ireland that was fast disappearing--if not, indeed, practically vanished already" (12).  By turning the often-vicious Ned into a "character," whose oddities are just the pleasurable eccentricities of a pre-modern age, the Slievenagheeha community mistake ahistorical depravity for historical difference.   As we learn much later, this confidence trick  repeats that of Redmond's Uncle Florian, who manages to take his young nephew away for "dance" sessions under the enchanted nuns' very noses.  Florian in fact represents his and Redmond's encounters as folk training of sorts (190).  Enthralled by the spectre of "authentic" Irishness, mothers and mother-figures don't just allow their children to be victimized, but inadvertently encourage it.   It's not history per se that's the trap, but a particular fantasy of history, associated with music, nostalgia, pleasure, and, above all, the "traditional," all purportedly bound up in rural, pre-modern men.

As you might guess from the above, both Redmond and the other male characters have problems with women generally and female sexuality specifically.  Although Redmond denies it when it's brought to his attention, all of the men subscribe, consciously or otherwise, to the age-old virgin vs. whore dichotomy: Redmond idealizes his two wives as (figurative) virgins until they reveal themselves as whores by committing adultery, which twice repeats Ned Strange's even more extreme relationship to his lost beloved, Annemarie, who may or may not have committed adultery with a wealthy man returned from America, John Olson.  Both Redmond's and Ned's rhetoric of passionate, all-consuming adoration--Redmond's "flawless union" with Catherine, for example (20)--echo and reinforce Slievenagheeha's similarly pathological fantasies about Ned and Florian.  And the result of such fantasies, once again, is brutal violence, this time meted out against the women themselves.  While Ned's story about punishing Annemarie proves fluid, encompassing everything from drowning to nothing at all, Redmond first tries to replace his adored Catherine with another "C," Casey, then winds up murdering both Catherine and his equally adored daughter, Imogen.  This murder repeats and renders certain the murder/death by natural causes of his own mother and the maybe-murder of Annemarie.  Redmond murders in order to truly possess the women he loves and desires, making them permanent virgins, so to speak; burying them in "Winterwood," so named by Imogen, is his way of freezing time.  (There's something rather "Porphyria's Lover"-esque about this.)

If nearly all of the women find themselves shoehorned into one stereotype or the other, the men are even more interchangeable.  Ned Strange shares his fiddle-playing and sexual perversions with Florian, his smoking and drinking habits with Redmond's father, and his attitude to women with Redmond.   Moreover, all four men actually look alike:  "I swear I was the image of Uncle Florian and Ned.  And, of course, of my own deceased father.  You wouldn't have been able to tell us apart" (195).  Gothic usually  depends on doubling and repetition, but Winterwood extends its doubles to triples and quadruples.   In fact, Ned Strange points out to Redmond that "Hatch" derives from ait, meaning both "place" and, more worrisomely, "strange" (129).  Redmond, determinedly out of place as he wanders from one urban area to another, is permanently estranged--but not so estranged as to be able to escape his destiny, which is merely to repeat, yet again, the deadly sexual dynamics of the mountain.  In an ironic twist, it may be a blessing that Redmond, like Ned, never manages to sire his hoped-for son.

The cumulative effect of such repetitions is to call historical change into question.  On the one hand, because the novel so resolutely associates a certain idea of "Irishness" with Gothic decay, it becomes impossible to endorse the only past on view.  There is no actual transition between "traditionalism and modernism" (to quote the dj), because the few remnants of traditionalism, like the ceilidh, have been modernized.  On the other hand, the novel represents modernity in terms of a mainly American cultural imperialism, albeit one that--Bill Clinton aside--resides in the silliest of pop culture forms: My Little Pony (!), Sweet Valley High, Care Bears, and, of course (?), Dallas.  Even though Redmond, musing on both George W. Bush and the end of "the war in the North of Ireland," concludes (not very insightfully) that "the world is in a state of flux" (139), it is never quite clear where anything resembling an Irish national identity might fit into the mix.  Redmond's documentary, which is simultaneously the crowning glory of his journalistic career and the cause of his final breakdown, embodies this problem: he juxtaposes the "vibrant new valley," overloaded with new, internationally-based businesses and residential areas, to the "evanescent, primordial Eden" of the lost valley, which nevertheless also contains the "tumble-down stone cottage" in which Florian molested Redmond (207).  Modernization, which renders Ireland's landscape simultaneously unrecognizable and cosmopolitan, also makes that same landscape "vibrant," while the lost paradise turns out to contain a particularly ugly snake.

Is there a canonical text in this book?

Dr. Crazy comments on "the necessity of framing one's work as a scholar in ways that will be marketable and in ways that fit into the demands of the economy of the academy":

Sometimes that necessity is at odds with our politics (for example: while it is a valuable feminist project to write on less canonical women authors, most departments aren't looking to hire a specialist in Esoteric Woman Writer, nor are most journals looking to publish articles on her) or at odds with our beliefs about what "scholarship" should be (that it should somehow be "pure" and outside of what is often an oppressive market-driven structure). The trick, I think, is finding a way to negotiate the competing demands of our personal passions and interests and of the market that determines the material resources that we have to pursue those passions and interests. And that is a really difficult set of competing demands to negotiate. And there's no one-size-fits-all model for doing it.

One of the difficulties of working on a project involving Super-Duper-Ultra-Non-Canonical texts is attempting to explain why we should know something about them specifically.  For example, a helpful older article about the font of W. M. Thackeray's History of Henry Esmond, James C. Simmons' "Thackeray's Esmond and Anne Manning's 'Spurious Antiques,'" uses Manning and the reception of her work to explain why Thackeray might have wanted to use an older typeface for his first edition [1].  But while this method indicates that Manning (along with Hannah Rathbone) first collaborated with her publisher to utilize antiquarian typefaces for historical fiction, it eventually displaces her in favor of Thackeray.  That is, Manning's fiction turns into Esmond's historical context; it does not exist as an object of interest or investigation in its own right.  Three decades later, Simmons' article would still be  more publishable in many scholarly niches than, say, a single-author article on E. C. Agnew, who wrote one of the most famous Catholic novels of the nineteenth century. 

This problem multiplies once you enter book territory.  Like Dr. Crazy, I have canonical authors in my dissertation & Book One (in fact, Book One has an additional canonical author) because they made it easier to market both my work and myself to hiring committees, editors, and readers--even though the project's real focus was on the non-canonical work.  Book Two is much more, ah, exciting in this respect, because while the Victorians as a whole were passionately obsessed with the Reformation, and fictionalized it endlessly (sigh...), canonical Victorian novelists quietly avoided it altogether.  Sir Walter Scott wrote a couple of novels set during the Scottish Reformation (yay!), but he isn't a Victorian novelist (boo!).  George Eliot wrote a novel featuring Savonarola (yay?), who, by Victorian standards, qualifies as at least proto-Protestant (yay!), but as of yet, Romola doesn't interface well with any chapters I've planned (boo!).  Perhaps Scott will go in the introduction and Eliot in the conclusion...

[1]  James C. Simmons, "Thackeray's Esmond and Anne Manning's 'Spurious Antiques,'" Victorian Newsletter 42 (1973): 22-24. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (Vintage, 1993).  First volume in McCarthy's Border trilogy.  (Lift Bridge)
• Andrew Foster Altschul, Lady Lazarus (Harcourt, 2008).  Trials and travails of a biographer in search of his subject.  (eBay)
• Jennifer Devere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Duke, 1998).  Constituting "the Victorian" through race and gender.  (eBay; this & the next two books were part of a cheap bulk lot of Duke paperbacks)
• Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke, 1995).  Monstrous bodies in fiction and film.  (eBay)
• Bruce W. Robbins, The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (Duke, 1993).  The narrative functions of servants.  (eBay)
• The Home and Synagogue of the Modern Jew.  Sketches of Modern Jewish Life and Ceremonies (RTS, n.d.).  19th-c. European Judaism from an evangelical Christian perspective. 
• Crawford Gribben and Timothy C. F. Stunt, eds., Prisoners of Hope?: Aspects of Evangelical Millennialism in Britain and Ireland, 1800-1880 (Wipf & Stock/Paternoster, 2007).  Essay collection on the fortunes of various forms of millennialist thinking.  (Amazon)

University of Chicago Grad Students Organize

When I was at the University of Chicago in the early-to-mid 90s, many grad students were more puzzled than anything else by the suggestion that we unionize.  (At the time, most of us were complaining about the lack of teaching opportunities, not the exploitation of TAs.)    Now, however, Graduate Students United (which, apparently, is not quite a union) is campaigning for better teaching stipends and other benefits.  As I've said before, $1500/quarter isn't much more than I earned as a TA in the mid-90s!

I declare a moratorium

Another Jane Eyre?!

Things that cause anxiety, #291

Am I the only academic who becomes anxious when she never sees proof on an article/encyclopedia entry before it goes to press? I understand why some editors choose not to send proofs on to their potentially tardy authors, but still, I'd like to see what's been done to my prose.  (With reason, having had a "Please tell me I didn't write that"--*checks original text*--"I really didn't write that" moment a few years back.) 

They'd None of 'em Be Missed

As most Victorianists and/or Gilbert & Sullivan fans are aware, since very early on in The Mikado's career, the Lord High Executioner's "As Someday It May Happen" (the "little list" song) has not been performed as originally written.  Richard Suart and A. H. Smyth have now edited an entire anthology devoted to the song's many mutations.   On YT, courtesy of the English National Opera, Suart demonstrates some alternate versions  (1 2) and offers some hints about how to revise the song (3); you can also see a D'Oyly Carte version (1992).  (Via Talkin' Broadway.)

Biographers Behaving Badly

Oops. 

I'm trying to think of similar gaffes, although I can't come up with anything precisely identical.  There are plenty of other unfortunate errors that come to mind, like the infamous Oscar Wilde photo-that-wasn't, but they're a different order of problem. 

Stacks

Responding to a review forum devoted to her book, Between Women, Sharon Marcus comments:

...Rather than generalize about Victorian society using fiction alone or only a few kinds of historical documents, in Between Women I draw on prescriptive and descriptive sources, polemic and policy, image and text, fiction and reportage...The sources I use included biographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, popular magazines, children's books, pornographic literature, fashion imagery, debates in the periodical press about marriage and single life for women, anthropological treatises about the history of kinship, and novels by major and minor Victorian writers.  I hope that one effect of my book will be to encourage us to use a wider variety of sources when teaching and thinking about gender and sexuality in both the past and the present.  We continue to rely disproportionately on one or two sources, such as William Acton's essay on prostitution or W. R. Greg's on single women.  Those who cast a wider net still usually focus on only a few types of discourse, such as medical writing and advice literature, which inaccurately suggest that all Victorians considered women asexual, hysterical, or redundant unless married.  By placing prescriptive documents alongside visual and verbal sources designed both to prompt fantasy and register mundane reality, we can develop a more complex picture of women's lives.  [1]

A historian, I suspect, would be startled to discover that this is a different approach to "Victorian society" and "women's lives," although we English professors probably still need such reminders.  Nevertheless, from the point of view of a literary historian who works on Super-Duper-Ultra-Non-Canonical texts, Marcus' comment is worth highlighting, albeit from an alternate angle.  One  of the difficulties of working on SDUNC texts is that the literary field appears, for lack of a better term, "flat."  That is, beyond the distant borders tenanted by, say, G. P. R. James and W. H. Ainsworth, we have a surfeit of novels produced by a wide variety of publishers in multiple forms (newspaper serial, magazine serial, single-volume, triple-decker, etc.), which may or may not have been successful.   These novels may or may not have been noticed in newspaper or magazine reviews--more often not, especially as we travel further beyond those borders.  The usual reference points--the reviews, sometimes the interviews, allusions in other texts--do not necessarily exist.  In my line of work, a novel like Father Clement sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb because it was widely noticed outside the niche of specifically Christian journals and deployed as a cultural referent in what are now canonical texts (e.g., Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life). 

Hence the need, which even other academics occasionally don't understand, to read vast quantities of material before charting the field.   We cannot argue for what's "different" (in terms of language, narrative structures, subject matter, etc.) until we know what's "normal," and vice-versa.  In fact, it's very tempting to simply make Big Generalizations after reading just a few books, on the (dangerous) assumption that ephemeral texts are effectively interchangeable.  A Victorianist raised on a diet of the first- , second- , and even third-ranked novelists may not realize what preconceptions she has about how Victorian fiction works until she approaches entirely non-canonical texts (which, of course, far outnumber their canonical and demi-canonical cousins).  Random example: the literary histories of masculinity undertaken by James Eli Adams and Christopher Lane do not align at all (and I do mean at all) with ideas about masculinity circulating in religious fiction, even at the end of the century.  Non-canonical/demi-canonical works have a rude habit of shoving back at theoretical projects explicitly based on canonical works. 

[1] Sharon Marcus, "Book Review Forum: Response," Victorian Studies 50.1 (Autumn 2007): 51-52. 

How does your garden grow?

I've always felt like a bit of a fraud when teaching Romantic nature poetry, because Nature and I do not have what I would call a cordial relationship.  Owning a house means taking care of the garden and lawn, of course, but my mother is responsible for more of the current garden than I am.  It's not like I want to pave Nature over, or anything, but Spring's arrival always triggers a raft of puzzling discoveries:

1.  Are you there, lawn? It's me, Miriam.  My house's previous occupant worked for the park service,  and he had a thing for trees.  What he didn't have a thing for, it seems, was landscaping.  Ergo, my front and back yard are clotted with Random Trees, which in turn interfere with that one thing necessary for the lawn--namely, sun.  Needless to say, I don't have shade-friendly grass--in fact, in several spots I have no grass, period--and my occasional gardener (by which I mean the one who does this for a living, not Mom the Retired School Administrator) feels skeptical about reseeding under the current landscape conditions. But I can't axe the rare American Chestnuts, and the other trees are so large that I can afford to remove them only one at a time.  To make matters worse, while mowing my weeds lawn a couple of days ago, I discovered Mysterious Ground Cover, which is currently in the process of, ah, covering the ground.   (I'm having the much-sunnier front yard reseeded sometime this summer, though.)

2.  Tiptoe through the tulips.   Last year, I had leaves, but no tulips.  This year, many tulips.  I see that there was also some tulip-related Gardening by Squirrel, although not bizarrely so--e.g., no tulips growing out of the middle of my lawn. 

3.  Death comes for the azaleas.  Going into last winter, I had five living azaleas; now I have one.  "But, officer, I didn't do anything different!" I cried.  Then again, I haven't done in the rhubarb (which I could live without, honestly--I always let one of my neighbors abscond with it), and the holly bushes I planted last summer are, amazingly enough, looking pretty cheerful.  I probably can't take credit for the survival of the hostas, given that, as a friend of mine pointed out, killing hostas is more of a problem than keeping them alive.

4.  Blowing a raspberry.  I've tried to eradicate a badly-located raspberry bush twice now, and the darn thing keeps coming back.  In fact, not only is the bush practically a phoenix, it has mysteriously spread to the back property line, possibly as a result of Gardening by Squirrel, Bird, or Rabbit. 

5.  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Ground Cover.  When the front yard was regraded a few years ago, the new topsoil apparently contained the seeds of some Mysterious Ground Cover (not, incidentally, related to the Mysterious Ground Cover currently threatening my back yard).  This MGC appears to be completely invincible.  Pulling it doesn't work.  Digging it up doesn't work.  Brush killer doesn't work.  With my luck, it's going to demand to have a go at me one of these days. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, 2007).  Dominican adolescent tries to write fantasy novels while his family deals with the fallout from a curse.  (QPB)
• C. L. Trivier, How I Came Out from Rome. An Autobiography (RTS, [1874]).  Translation from the French of an ex-priest's conversion narrative.  (eBay)
• The Local Preachers Magazine, and Mutual Aid Association Reporter (1851-52).  Volumes I and II of a Methodist magazine. (eBay)
• Marilyn Cohen and Nancy J. Curtin, eds., Reclaiming Gender: Transgressive Identities in Modern Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).  Essay collection devoted to gender, religion, politics, culture, etc. in Ireland from the nineteenth century to the present.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Brief note: Severance

Robert Olen Butler's Severance (2006) consists of 240-word short-short stories, told by a series of talking heads--literally.  Each plotless, stream-of-consciousness tale begins at the moment of decapitation and ends with the head's final death.  The heads in question form an interesting jumble of historical, mythical, and fictional beings, starting with a caveman from 43,000 BC and ending with the author himself (mysteriously decapitated "on the job" [256]).  Aside from decapitation, there are no real similarities among the characters.  Some die in accidents, some are guillotined, some are punished for real or imagined crimes, some are somebody's else's dinner, and so forth.  Structurally, the collection at times seems like a free-wheeling homage to Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, mixed up with Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations: several of the posthumous speakers cluster at a particular historical moment, like the French Revolution, or are corresponding pairs, like St. George and his dragon.  (The French Revolution cluster, which begins with Louis XVI, ends with Robespierre, and has a coda of sorts featuring a criminal guillotined in the 1830s, is the most Masters-ish; its irony, though, is a matter of structure rather than dialogue.)  Death, as always, is the great leveler; the politicians and monarchs mingle with an American chicken. While Butler doesn't try to construct a sense of posthumous community, the dreamlike tales interact through visual and thematic echoes, ranging from erotic imagery to different forms of consumption--including the consumption of bodies, whether through cannibalism or eucharistic imagery.   

 

All of the tales consist of a single, run-on sentence, usually fragmentary.  Butler emphasizes the temporal rush of his characters' memories through generous use of asyndeton, as well as coordinating conjunctions like "and" ("and we alone sit at flame and suckle woman puts her hand upon her head alone and puts her mouth to our ear alone and makes a soft cry" [13]).   Each head organizes his or thoughts around a particular word or image, an associative process which carries the tale forward in lieu of a plot.  Thus, Catherine Howard keeps returning to "tumble," which begins as a sexual noun ("what a tumble") and ends on the scaffold, ominously, as a verb ("I tumble" [81]).   Similarly, Thomas More's "king" slowly morphs from Henry VIII into Christ (73).  While very few characters even notice that they've been beheaded--Howard is one of the ones who does--the word "head" itself frequently intrudes at the end after the end of their lives, rather like the head of Charles I that keeps cropping up in Mr. Dick's history.   

Although the tales neither have plots nor conform to old cliches about "your life flashing before your eyes," they all emphasize processes, persons or things mutating and coming-to-be.  The most metafictional tales, like that of advertising executive Robert Kornbluth, dwell on individuals finding themselves momentarily face to face with their own language.  Kornbluth opens with an imperative--"look I cry"--that directs the audience not to a Wordsworthian field of daffodils, but to an ad for Burma Shave (201).  As it turns out, Kornbluth not only writes ad copy, but he also automatically thinks in ad copy.   The opening "look" turns out to be addressed to Kornbluth's wife, and he spends the rest of the tale confronting her anguish with his tag lines, "words I know will do only harm" (201).   Anchoring his flashback in allusions to classic consumer goods, from a 1952 Packard to Hanes underwear, Kornbuth finds that this language of desire is entirely inadequate to handling his wife's rage; comfortable selling objects to a mass public, Kornbluth cannot find a way of acknowledging his wife's interiority.  He can persuade an invisible audience, but has no speech for intimacy with a single person--even himself.  In a sense, he has no speech that has not already been depersonalized, whether by being posted on a billboard or turned into a TV commercial.   Even his epitaph, amusingly and pathetically enough, turns out to be ad copy: "DON'T LOSE, YOUR HEAD, TO GAIN A MINUTE, YOU NEED YOUR HEAD, YOUR BRAINS ARE IN IT" (201). 

On chatting with a graduate coordinator after a rejection (or, why protesting a rejection is not like protesting a grade)

This is that time of year when graduate coordinators behold students who, for whatever reason, have not been accepted into a (the) graduate program of their choosing.  If you are one of those students, and are disconcerted/dismayed/distressed/otherwise dis- about your rejection, here are some suggestions for successfully discussing matters with a graduate coordinator:

1.  To begin with, you were almost certainly turned down not by a single person, but by a committee (or, in the case of some doctoral programs, the entire department).  Graduate Coordinator X is usually not the sole person responsible, and should not be addressed (attacked) as such.  Moreover, Graduate Coordinator X usually cannot overturn the committee's/department's decision all by his or her lonesome.
2.  What does the rejection letter say? If you did not meet the minimum qualifications as laid out on the admissions form, then protesting is perhaps not the ideal response in this situation.   
3.  Along the same lines, there are some questions (qualifications, application procedures, GRE requirements, deadlines, etc.) that you should have asked before you submitted the application.  If you a) did not do so and b) were rejected for something have to do with same, then c) again, protesting is not the ideal response.  By the same token, if you insisted in your application that you only wanted t