The Little Professor

The Practical Applications of Gothic Fiction

As we all know, one of the standard excuses for reading (gasp) novels has always been that fiction has a Deep Moral Purpose: it enlightens us about Life, Ethics, and even the Soul.  Of course, such justifications often collapse when confronted with fiction that appears to be merely Fun.  Anything in the Gothic line--horror, ghost stories, crumbling castles, the random demon--can only be regarded in the light of Frivolous Entertainment, not Philosophical Enlightenment.  I propose, however, that Gothic teaches us a number of useful life lessons, all of them essential to our continued well-being.  Many of these lessons are remarkably pragmatic in nature.  For example:

1.  Never rent.  Rentals are always haunted.  If there have been five or more renters in the past year, there is a strong likelihood that the apartment or house is occupied by the ghost of an axe murderer or serial killer.
2.  Travel is bad.  Any trip away from home will bring you face-to-face with a vampire, ghoul, or flying head.  Stay home and help preserve the environment (as well as your future well-being).
3.  If you must travel, bring a Latin grammar.  It may be necessary to conjugate obscure Latin verbs, especially when they are written on whistles.
4.  Avoid fine art.  Do not buy paintings, remove them from the attic, or even remain in the same room with them for any length of time.  If the painting moves or appears in your dreams,  it is generally advised that you relocate.  Immediately. 
5.  Make appropriate career choices.  Archaeology, for example, should always be avoided, since artifacts are usually cursed and tombs often house vampires.  Art history also has a number of drawbacks (see previous item).  Those contemplating a career in science should be especially cautious, since ghosts love to haunt scientists.   
6.  Double-check your betrothed's state of health before proceeding to the altar.  In some unfortunate instances, corpses have been known to appear at weddings. 
7.  Insist that your realtor disclose the history of all previous residents.  Avoid purchasing homes or apartments if they were previously occupied by judges, suicides, or anyone with a failed romance.
8.  Do not attend college.  The more degrees, the more likely you are to disbelieve in ghosts--which will result in your painful, drawn-out, and often bloody death.  If you must attend college...
9. ...then always listen to the housekeeper or butler.  All housekeepers' and butlers' reports about pale women walking through corridors at night, mysterious cold snaps, fountains of blood, etc. are true and should be taken seriously.
10.  Do not buy old books.   You will probably encounter a demon. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (Scribner, 1998).  Very, very revisionist take on Uncle Tom's Cabin, among other things.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (NYRB, 2002).  Reprint of Trilling's novel about the trials and travails of leftist intellectuals at midcentury. (eBay)
• Joshua Harmon, Quinnehtukqut (Starcherone, 2007).  Experimental historical novel, following a young girl's experiences in New Hampshire. (Amazon [secondhand])
• Ruth Brandon, Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres (Walker, 2008).  New historical study.  See also.  (HBC)
• Patricia Allderidge, Richard Dadd (St. Martin's, 1974).  Study of the Victorian fairy painter, whose best-known work is probably The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke (see also Dadd's explanation).  (eBay)
• The Penny Pulpit: A Collection of Accurately-Reported Sermons by the Most Eminent Ministers of Various Denominations (1851-52).  Bound volume of Protestant sermons.  You can see a later volume here.  (eBay)
• Bulletins of the Society of Saint Vincent-de-Paul (1853-54).  Bound volume, the only one issued in English.  (eBay)

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection

Gardner Dozois' anthology of thirty-two stories is, as always, noteworthy for featuring generally well-written and well-crafted stories, many of which lean to the dystopian.  Surprisingly, given Dozois' affection for online venues, all but two stories originated in print magazines and other anthologies, and the two exceptions both came from the same venue.  While the number of apocalypto-fics continues to decline (and the two most obvious examples are not manmade apocalypses), Dozois still has a taste for visions of the future in which terrorism and total warfare are a fact of life. 

In some ways, this was a very "flat" anthology, in the sense that no single story stood out as particularly adventurous; nearly all the stories were, as I said, well-crafted, but there are no exceptionally striking or startling entries.  Just about everything is told in linear fashion and in the realist mode, and few of the authors have a really individuated style.  Three of the stories have metafictional or metahistoriographical aspirations.  John Barnes' "An Ocean Is a Snowflake, Four Billion Miles Away" follows two future documentary filmmakers as they record both each other and the terraforming of Mars; their interactions (filmed by cameras pointedly called "stalkers"), their editorial practices, and their philosophies of documentary art all leave "reality" up in the air.  Similarly, Tom Purdom's "The Mists of Time," a time-travel story, suggests that the present's interpretive frameworks will not be dispelled just by exposure to a past event in real time.  In the end, even the past is trying to live up to its own past.   And Elizabeth Bear's "Tideline," set in an unknown wartime environment, shows how storytelling and memory can begin to reunite an otherwise entirely atomized culture.  The story most explicitly engaged with the SF literary past, meanwhile, is Nancy Kress' "Laws of Survival," which rewrites Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" on feminist terms.  ("A Boy and His Dog" gets namechecked in passing.)  For Kress' heroine, whose son was murdered by soldiers, training dogs for some unknown alien purpose leads her to revise her fifth "law," "Feel nothing" (493), into the more emotionally adventurous "Take the risk.  Love something" (504).  There is no certainty at the end of the story--not least because our heroine is flying off to some unknown planet--but, at least, there is a makeshift affective community.

Of the two full-blown apocalypses, I preferred Robert Reed's gentle "Roxie," in which the narrator's love for his dog (and apparent alienation from his wife and child) eventually becomes a meditation on what makes a life worth living--in the face of a very likely meteor strike that will destroy civilization as we know it.   The oddest of the total war stories is Ian McDonald's "Verthandi's Ring," involving multiple universes, intergalactic conflict, and wild strategies that would probably stump Clausewitz.  McDonald's other entry, "Sanjeev and Robotwallah," is a more measured, elegiac story about adolescents recruited for long-distance soldiering, and what happens to them once the war is over; once a morbid rock star, of a sort, the impoverished Sanjeev's robotwallah ultimately turns into a defeated child again, "like a calf, quiet and meek" (308).  The childhood and warfare theme (also a part of "Tideline") arises again in Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Craters," which bears some similarities to another story anthologized by Dozois a few years back, Daniel Abraham's "Leviathan Wept."  As in Abraham's story, "Craters" imagines a world in which children have been turned into suicide bombers (here, the children literally are bombs); confronted with a horribly mutilated child who managed to survive her own explosion, Rusch's journalist protagonist grimly realizes that she has become a person for whom such a child is just "another fact in a lifetime of useless facts" (547). 

Financial speculation, capitalism, greed, and general profit-seeking tend to be alive and well (so to speak) in all of these futures.  Granted, as in Ken MacLeod's rather John Varleyesque "Lighting Out," things don't always go quite so well as the future eBayer (of a sort) intends.  Neal Asher's adventure tale "Alien Archeology," which returns to gabbleducks, is moderately less sadistic--despite torture, decapitation, etc.--than his previous outing in this universe.      Kage Baker's "Hellfire at Twilight," one of her Company stories, is probably the fluffiest story in the anthology, but it provides some welcome comic relief from the death and destruction elsewhere.  The most complex of the financial tales, however, is Bruce Sterling's "Kiosk," which imagines how replication devices might affect a downtrodden, post-war economy, while also suggesting the unpredictability and, perhaps, the sheer strangeness of history; it's someone from "a small place under unique circumstances," whose story is altered beyond recognition by outsiders who were "the Voice of History," who manages to change the globe (267).  Like "The Mists of Time," "Kiosk" dryly notes that the past will always be a foreign country.

Of the remaining stories, the one I found most interesting was Vandana Singh's "Of Love and Other Monsters," which is one of the stories that dwells on what happens when humans encounter something entirely Other.  In a way, the story literalizes Homi Bhabha's theories of mimicry and hybridity.   The aliens are both us and not-us, and humans "feel alienated, not only from each other but from their own selves" because we have been colonized from within (361).  (That's one way of answering Arnold's question.)  The narrator is himself an alien who has been "fixed," as it were, into a single form; his coming-of-age is really a coming-of-alienation, the realization both that he is mimicking humanity and that humanity itself has become a sort of hybrid, two species at war within single minds.  What to do--embrace one's terrifying difference, which might turn out to be a comfort, or try to find some companionship with others who both are and aren't like you at all?

Brief note: The Keep

Jennifer Egan's novel-within-a-novel, The Keep, has three narrative tracks: there's Ray, the murderer writing a novel for his jailhouse creative writing class, whose voice occasionally intrudes into the limited third person POV of "his" novel's narrator; there's Danny, the protagonist of Ray's novel, who goes abroad to help his cousin renovate a decrepit castle; and there's Holly, Ray's creative writing teacher (who remains a figment of Ray's consciousness until the final pages).  Near the beginning, an irate Holly tells Ray that "[t]here's the door [...] Why don't you just walk out?" (18) and all three narratives explore the literal and figurative ramifications of that question.  Characters spend most of their time being trapped (in prison, in dungeons, in drug addiction, in bad relationships, in caves) and looking for exits.  Very predictably, the novel proposes that the creative power of language constitutes one form of exit, and in a moment of apparent magical realism near the end, Ray's novel seems to produce the castle about which he's writing.*  Egan juxtaposes Danny's frantic electronic connectedness to writing and dreaming in isolation; the former produces endless, frequently meaningless bursts of text which signal a real lack of connection, as in the messages that Danny sends without expecting an answer (65), while the latter reshapes both stories and the world.    Audiences are important in this novel, but Egan nevertheless insists that artists need solitary spaces in which to work--even if that space has to be a prison.

I was a little frustrated by Egan's novel of surfaces, Look at Me, and I continue to be frustrated here.  The novel's main argument about the liberatory power of language is, for lack of a better word, safe.  The reader expects that the characters will discover how to free themselves through speech (not to mention some creative thinking on the part of Ray and his cellmate), and...they do.   Even the hidden joke of Ray's novel, in which the plot coyly lays out Ray's final plans, makes a conventional, detective novel-type point about how readers interpret clues.   It's disappointing to find the novel ending there, because the narrative is much more interesting when it suggests that literature's work on the audience can be anarchic, unpredictable.  Ray's story leaves his fellow prisoners in suspense, which leads to one of them complaining that he "feel[s] bad not knowing" (59)--before he charges across the room and assaults Ray (61).  Later on, Ray's refusal to acknowledge the power of another prisoner's story so enrages the other man that he stabs Ray and nearly kills him (141).  Storytelling doesn't just produce a kind of disinterested pleasure; it creates resistance, powerful feeling, anger, joy, love, and deadly hate.  Egan's novel is at its liveliest when it explores just what powerful fictions do to both their readers and their writers, without tipping over into either the Don Quixote anti-romance tradition or a rah-rah "fiction as the Great Escape" mode.       

*--A reading which depends on how you assess the "autobiographical" component of Ray's novel, I should point out. 

Sunday (Feral) Cat Blogging

Those of you familiar with CSU Long Beach may have noticed that it has a feral cat colony, which has been there for decades.  This is a managed feral colony: for many years, volunteers have not only fed the cats, but also provided veterinary care.  Because the policy is trap-neuter-return, the volunteers have managed to cut the colony's numbers in half--down to about 150 (here's an older profile with higher numbers).  Alas, a pair of coyotes have moved on campus, seeking dinner.  The university's response? Get rid of the cats. 

Mom the School Administrator has been assisting the original volunteers for the past few months.  As she notes, the university's proposal--have the volunteers remove all the cats within forty days--is simply impossible.  Many of the cats know perfectly well what traps look like and have evaded capture for years; it's not likely that they're going to be caught now.  Moreover, while the volunteers have successfully removed kittens, none of the adult cats are adoptable.  There are about three or four cats which enjoy being petted, but as one of the volunteers has discovered, they will not tolerate being relocated from their territories.  A handful of others will come within two or three feet of people who feed them, but are not otherwise interested in or friendly to humans.  "Removing" the cats therefore really means euthanizing them. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Lin Enger, Undiscovered Country: A Novel (Little, Brown).  Hamlet, albeit in Minnesota.  (Review copy)
• Daniel Wallace, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician: A Novel (Doubleday, 2007).  Faust, albeit in the 1950s.  (QPB)
• Bibliotheca Sacra and American Biblical Repository 10 (1853). One volume of a well-known (and still active) American theological magazine, reprinted in the UK; Biblical criticism, comparative religion, etc. (eBay)

The Little Foxes

A colleague and I trekked out* to the Shaw Festival to see Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939).  I suspect that with a weaker cast, The Little Foxes would appear rather schematic, like J. B. Priestley's more anvil-dropping An Inspector Calls (1945) (also playing at the SF, coincidentally).   Set quite pointedly in 1900--the characters themselves remark on the historical significance of the date--the play uses the Giddens and Hubbard families to chart the upheavals in postbellum Southern economic history: the financial failure of the old aristocracy, their absorption by an increasingly "acceptable" merchant class ("merger by marriage"), and, in turn, the merchants' alliances with Northern capitalists.  Birdie, wed for her family's plantation, dreamily reminisces about trips through the European capitals to listen to music; Regina, frustrated in her attempts to get her hands on cash, fantasizes about Chicago first and Paris as a fashion capital second.  Hovering around the edges are the African-American laborers, whose exploitation by the greedy Hubbards troubles Birdie, Regina's daughter Alexandra, and Regina's ailing husband, Horace.   (As this review notes, the African-American servants are basically a Greek chorus who "understand the world far better than their masters.")   Except for Horace's relationship with Alexandra, the families are hugely (and autobiographically) dysfunctional.  The alcoholic Birdie is physically abused by her husband, Oscar, while Regina manipulates her daughter, hates Horace (and her brothers), and ultimately connives at Horace's death, the better to further her own agenda. 

In effect, the play maps out three ways for women to respond to a male-dominated capitalist system.  Birdie, who longs for people to be "kind," drinks to drown her sadness and rage.  But she also hides in nostalgic fantasies about her family's lost plantation, which she represents as a haven of emotional stability and domestic tranquility; as her pride in how her family treated the slaves suggests, she is unwilling to look too closely at the suffering involved in creating this long-lost idyll.   She is, to borrow the language used by the ex-slave, Addie, one of those who "stand by" when they see injustices committed.  By contrast, Regina feels no compunction about adopting the strategies of her ultra-capitalist brothers, even if it means shortening her husband's life by a few weeks or so.   Financially manipulated by first her father and then her husband, Regina desperately wants in to a system that keeps trying to erase her from it.  It's no accident that Hellman leaves Regina and her brother Ben in an uneasy balance of mutual blackmail.  Regina's daughter Alexandra, however, chooses to leave the family altogether--even if, as Robert Cushman comments, we're left "to wonder whether it heralds a new era of selflessness, or just more of the same."  Will Alexandra remake history by opting out of what Ben and Regina think is the new world order?

The characters who trouble this entire discussion of capitalism are the ex-slaves, Addie and Carl, who are no longer property but are hardly on a par with their white employers (as both are pointedly reminded).   It's notable that Hellman defines them by their problematic relationship to money.  If they can no longer be bought and sold themselves, they can now be forced to buy (goods and food) and sell (their labor) at highly exploitative prices.  Alexandra's escape to wherever depends, in fact, on Horace's decision to do an end-run around the law--both he and Addie know that she cannot be written into the will--by giving Addie a gift of $1700.  While this substantial gift does promise to "liberate" Addie from one form of exploitation, the play doesn't really examine whether or not her ongoing loyalty to Alexandra (and Horace's expectation that Addie will help rescue Alexandra) is another. 

The Little Foxes is playing at the tiny Royal George, and the staging feels appropriately claustrophobic.  The living room is furnished in very Victorian style, complete with uncomfortable-looking chairs and a plush couch, and the set is constructed in such a way that you suspect that the room doesn't get much natural light.  (The sole "window" sits high up, on the stairs.)  The various knicknacks all seem to be getting in the way (watch the actors try to avoid knocking them over).  All of the actors give fine performances, especially Laurie Paton as the ruthless Regina and Sharry Flett as the miserable Birdie.  It's well worth a trip to Niagara-on-the-Lake. 

*--And, for once, managed to get back through US customs in thirty minutes, as opposed to the usual two hours or so. 

The Silver Swan

John Banville returns to neo-noir with The Silver Swan, published under his appropriate pseudonym Benjamin Black.  A couple of years have passed since the events of Christine Falls, and various people important to his protagonist, the pathologist Quirke, have either died (Sarah) or suffered poetic justice (Garrett Griffin, paralyzed by a stroke); to make matters worse, the revelation that he is the real father of his "niece," Phoebe, has only served to alienate him from her.  On what should be the upside, Quirke is no longer drinking.  Nevertheless, he once again stumbles over an inconvenient crime when an old school acquaintance, Billy Hunt, asks him not to perform an autopsy on Billy's wife, Deirdre, who apparently committed suicide.  Unfortunately, a glimpse of the needle mark in Deirdre's arm scuppers that plan...

Like Christine Falls, The Silver Swan does not attempt much in the way of formal or stylistic innovation. 
The novel consists of two narratives that join up at the novel's conclusion, all in third person limited POV: Deirdre's story, which explains how she falls in with the mysterious Dr. Kreutz and the sleazy Leslie White, and the postmortem story, as it were, which mainly follows Quirke and Phoebe (although other POVs get a look-in as well).  To a certain extent, Banville incorporates metafictional elements that reflect back on the text as a genre fiction, but metafiction has always been a characteristic of the mystery.  Thus, pondering his discovery that Deirdre had to have been murdered, Quirke asks himself if he wants "to become involved in another version of all that [the previous case]," despite the fact that he's in a sequel and therefore has no choice in the matter (25); Phoebe waxes sardonic about Quirke's "'little gray cells'" (83), an allusion to Agatha Christie's Poirot series; Inspector Hackett deliberately uses a "formula" that "made people uneasy, for it was the kind of thing they would have heard policemen in the pictures saying when what they really meant was that what was going to follow would be anything but routine" (120), suggesting that fictional policework has slowly infested reality.  The last point in particular also characterizes the kind of fictionalizing that most of the characters insist on for themselves, ranging from the professional names used by both Deirdre ("Laura Swan") and Dr. (or "Dr.") Hakeem Kreutz to Billy Hunt's oikish public persona to, indeed, Quirke's own attempt to cover up the murder. 

To the extent that Banville plays with expectations, in fact, it is at the level of genre conventions.  At the most basic level, this is still standard noir.  Banville's version of 1950s Dublin is entirely godless, despite the presence of the church (the priests rarely do anything priestly and there's a rather spectacularly blasphemous moment involving Deirdre); everything is alcohol-soaked, corrupt, sexualized, and generally seedy.  There are, however, some changes to the noir formula.  Most notably, Banville substitutes an homme fatale, Leslie White, for the femme fatale, and insists that there is a residue of justice in the police force, in the form of Inspector Hackett.  Even more ironically, the true "'innocent'" (84) turns out to be not any of the women involved, even Quirke's daughter, but Quirke himself.  As Inspector Hackett--who actually solves the case--says to Quirke at the end, "'But you really don't see it, do you? I thought you were less gullible.  I also thought you had a less rosy view of human beings and their doings'" (278).   In noir, the female innocent or "angel," like Effie in The Maltese Falcon or Lola in the film version of Double Indemnity, isn't defined just by her conventionality and sexual purity, but also by her optimism.  No matter how badly others act (Effie, after all, knows perfectly well that Sam Spade has been carrying on with Iva), the angels believe strongly in the possibility of goodness.*  It's ironic to find the supposedly world-weary Quirke in that position, but his attempt to short-circuit the murder inquiry (now encompassing multiple bodies), on the erroneous grounds that "justice has been done" (276), rests on the assumption that such vigilante justice shows that individuals can act righteously in an otherwise unrighteous world.

Unfortunately, Banville doesn't really follow up on the gender implications of an homme fatale and a male angel, beyond suggesting that 1950s Dublin was not a hotbed, so to speak, of Catholic virgins.  He does resuscitate Christine Falls' preoccupation with what it means to take action.  Garrett Griffin's paralysis, which reflects Quirke's moral paralysis in the first novel, symbolizes the state of Irish culture as a whole.  As an American character, Rose, complains, "'[t]he way you go about in a cowed silence, not protesting, not complaining, not demanding that things should change or be fixed or made new'" (256).  When Quirke informs Hackett that "I want you to do nothing" (276), he rests serenely on the belief that justice has already been done, that the right corrective action has been taken (by someone else).  But instead, this request reveals, in a bleak irony, that Quirke has merely reasoned himself into embracing Ireland's paralysis; indeed, to the extent that he tries to cover up a murder, he is repeating the crimes of the first novel (as Hackett bemusedly reminds him).  It's fitting that in the novel's final sentences, Quirke "stood there, paralyzed.  He did not know where to go.  He did not know what to do" (290). 

*--This is a slightly different take on the usual reading of the angel (e.g., here).

Brief observation on an elephant: Victorian feminism and religion

I'm not "in" Women's Studies per se, although I spent a couple of years on my college's Women's Studies Board, so I cannot speak to what's going on in the average WS classroom.  These two posts at Feministe, however, gave me some pause: would it even be possible to think about the history of feminist activism without integrating it with religious belief? Both Fatemeh and Natalia Antonova are writing about contemporary feminist experience, which is fine, but certainly within my limited frame of scholarly reference (the UK), feminism cannot be conceptualized apart from religion.  And these religious beliefs operated in completely unpredictable ways.  One might predict that  Mary Wollstonecraft would be a feminist, but what about a very orthodox Anglican like Mary Astell--whose feminism was thoroughly grounded in spiritual as well as philosophical convictions?   On my home turf, the feminists associated with the Langham Place Group are a remarkably mixed theological bag, ranging from Catholic converts like Adelaide Anne Procter to ex-evangelical (but still devout) Christians like Emily Davies to outright freethinkers like Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon.  (Procter and Bessie Rayner Parkes show just how unpredictably faith commitments acted on feminist beliefs: Catholicism did not slow Procter's activism, but it appears to have entirely short-circuited Bessie Rayner Parkes'.)  Outside of the LPG, there are evangelical feminists like Josephine Butler, existing alongside the atheists like Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy.  Similarly, as I noted a couple of posts ago, religious radicalism didn't necessarily translate into feminism, as the varyingly problematic instances of George Eliot (whose feminism is the subject of never-ending debate...), Eliza Lynn Linton (very not feminist), and Mary Augusta (Mrs. Humphry) Ward (anti-suffrage campaigner) indicate.  Specialists in medieval and early modern history could no doubt go on at greater length.  The point being that all and no religious belief systems provided both feminists and anti-feminists with the intellectual resources to theorize women's social position; from a historical POV, talking about an infinitely complicated subject like religion in terms of praise or blame doesn't yield especially useful results. 

Steampunk: The Light Ages and (a bit of) The House of Storms

Much has already been said--sometimes in considerable exasperation--about Ian R. MacLeod's The Light Ages . As everyone noted when The Light Ages first appeared, the novel rewrites Charles Dickens' Great Expectations--which is also the kind of intertextuality one expects from neo-Victorian fiction.  Its sequel The House of Storms