Scott feels somewhat bemused by the Washington Post's choice of words ("a blogger named Scott Eric Kaufman, who says he has a PhD in English from the University of California at Irvine"). Only "says," says Scott? However, I suspect that the WaPo may actually be on to something. Let me explain.
[Clears throat]
Perhaps you have yet to realize it, but UCI does not grant Ph.D.s in English. Oh, no: all of its degrees are simulacra. The truth (well, it would be truth, if truth existed any longer, which it doesn't, at least not at 1:33 AM, Eastern time) of the matter is in this age of global capitalism, the age of the hyperreal, your diploma is a sign without a referent. The text inscribed on your diploma (and the very existence of the diploma as paper, a tangible object, is itself an attempt to produce the effect of reality, an effect all too necessary when it is possible to reduce one's dissertation, the labor of years, to ephemeral pixels, all weightless, unless you're viewing them on a laptop and you drop the laptop on your foot, in which case your scream of pain marks the rebellion of the somatic against the tyranny of the sign, sort of an updated Johnson vs. Bishop Berkeley thing, only with expensive electronics instead of a stone, so I really don't recommend it) conceals the non-existence of UCI as a university, as an institution apart from the shopping center across the street (and surely that connecting bridge announces what the university is all too keen to conceal, that the realms of intellect and commercialism have become fluid, indistinct, that consuming a slice of Z Pizza is no different from consuming a quarter's worth of CR100A, although the pepperoni pizza at Z Pizza is arguably tastier than excerpts from Foucault, and I recommend adding parmesan for extra zest, by which I mean the pizza and not Foucault, because parmesan does bad things to paper). It is impossible to have a Ph.D. from UCI, but one may be had by it.
[This post brought to you by CR100B, circa 1990. I kid because I love.]
Many years ago, I heard a sociologist tell an anecdote about being the only undergraduate at a faculty party. After a short while, he realized that somebody was watching him from a distance. Worse still, wherever he went, there his mysterious observer followed. Understandably anxious, he finally cornered one of his professors to find out what on earth was going on. "Oh, that's Erving," his professor sighed. "He's always on." The Erving in question was Erving Goffman, the author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). I kept flashing back to this anecdote while reading Patrick McGrath's Trauma, and not just because the protagonist's ex-wife is a sociologist clearly indebted to Goffman (110). McGrath's speaker, psychiatrist Charlie Weir, is always on.
McGrath's narrators are reliably unreliable. Charlie, however, posits that unreliability is the norm: "This falsification of memory--the adjustment, abbreviation, invention, even omission of everyday experience--is common to us all, it is the business of psychic life, and I was never seriously upset about it" (46). I'd suggest that with this novel, McGrath deliberately revisits previous narrative territory. Charlie's profession links him to Peter Cleave, the manipulative psychoanalyst of Asylum; his self-consciousness about unreliability and his fixation on a single formative moment also echo Gin, the narrator of McGrath's last full-length novel, Port Mungo (2005). Like Cleave, Charlie specializes in taming the most terrifying passions through speech. Unlike Cleave, however, Charlie emphasizes storytelling instead of diagnosis: with his clinical partner, Sam Pike, Charlie writes a book on PTSD, focusing on "the creation of the trauma story, the detailed narrative of the emotion, the context and the meaning of trauma" (116). Similarly, like Gin, Charlie's life has been shaped by a forbidden, if only partially glimpsed, sight. But unlike Gin, Charlie cannot remember that moment at all. To the reader's no great surprise, Charlie tells us at the beginning that he "guide[s]" his patients "toward what I believe to be the true core and substance of your problem" (5), but he proves incapable of identifying the "true core" of his own trauma. It doesn't help that Charlie may have precipitated the suicide of his ex-wife Agnes' brother, that he isn't especially successful with another of his male patients, and that he certainly has no luck with the women in his life.
And yet, although the novel drives towards the revelation that ought to solve Charlie's problem, it holds back. The revelation arrives in a tale told by his disliked older brother, Walt, and there is no sign that Charlie himself manages to remember the traumatic event "correctly." This non-solution hints at the difficulties posed by Charlie's own psychiatric practice, in which the psychiatrist prods the patient to arrive at the psychiatrist's understanding of the truth: the traumatic moment, supposedly the origin of the patient's pathology, takes form only in retrospect. Nor is it always clear that the trauma is the trauma; for example, Agnes' sister, Maureen, remarks that "it was obvious that Danny [their brother] would die young" (145), and Agnes similarly has to admit that the suicide "would've happened anyway" (157). In other words, even in cases of horrific trauma, the patient's ability to resolve trauma into a story--or not--rests on something anterior to that initial, shattering event. The psychiatrist's tale is frequently missing its head. Moreover, these tales aren't "reliable" so much as they are psychologically useful fictions, solutions that may or may not have real-world referents. It's telling that McGrath leaves so many plot points unresolved.
As a narrator, Charlie exemplifies the Victorian dramatic monologue in (updated) action. The speaker in a dramatic monologue often fantasizes that s/he has complete command over language, supposedly reducing all communication to the level of perfectly transparent intent. Much of the drama then derives from the fractures in the speaker's fantasy, which reveal what has purportedly been kept silent. Charlie, as I said in the beginning, is always on, so much so that when Agnes tells him to "[s]top thinking," he admits that he can't even begin to imagine such a thing: "I knew Agnes knew she was being unreasonable by refusing to disclose any motive or explanation, but I also knew she knew my curiosity would not be bound by the normal parameters, that in this regard I was not a normal man: I was a psychiatrist" (49). There is nothing that Charlie cannot diagnose, analyze, and dissect. His paragraphs are dominated by this affectless "I," which makes frequent claims to some masterful, all-seeing knowledge--but which also advertises the impenetrable subjectivism of his narrative. Unlike Peter Cleave, Charlie remains painfully aware that his diagnoses are subjective, a form of "art," not science (5). By the same token, Charlie knows that he must be silently editing his own memories; he just doesn't know what those memories are. The numbing incursion of "I," "me," "my," and "mine" into what seems like every sentence may imply self-consciousness...but, in the end, it also suggests that Charlie repeats the pronouns in order to conceal the lack of self behind them. His "presentation of self" turns out to be all, but it certainly isn't enough.
I've actually completed the draft of Book Two.
(Well, I've completed it until I get a slew of readers' reports telling me what to rewrite, add, delete, or cite, but still.)
The extremely useful Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History is about to become a lot less useful for those of us without an institutional subscription. (Via H-ALBION.)
A few weeks back, I did the math, and noted that I really didn't watch enough television to justify spending about $80/month on cable. Did shifting to online delivery alter my viewing habits?
Obviously, the results would be different if I were a more dedicated viewer, or if I avoided discussions that contained spoilers.
Historical novelists (unless they're the late George MacDonald Fraser) usually get around the problem of fictional characters interacting with historical ones by making them effectively "invisible": the fictional characters are private folk, the sort who normally don't appear in the historical record. They're servants, subordinate officers, low-level functionaries, random passers-by. Or, alternately, they're "important" but necessarily erased from history--secret agents, spies, and behind-the-scenes "fixers," for example. Or, again, they inhabit the halfway point between fictional and historical: we know that they're probably historical (e.g., Girl with a Pearl Earring), but we also know so little about them that they might as well be fictional.
Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, which at first glance appears to be an entirely conventional biofiction about Joseph R. "Joey" Smallwood, charges the problem head on--and gets around it by ignoring it entirely. Half of the novel is given over to Smallwood and his first-person autobiographical narrative; the other half to Sheilagh Fielding, Smallwood's lifelong obsession, a flamboyantly ironic journalist and op-ed writer who publishes under a series of pseudonyms ("Field Day"). Fielding's output includes her diary, her unpublished Condensed History of Newfoundland (complete with a forged preface), and her op-eds. Fielding turns out to be integral to Smallwood's life, career, and sense of self; her personal traumas eventually prompt him to what appears to be the only truly selfless, loving act of his life. And yet, she is entirely fictional. (As is David Prowse, Smallwood's nemesis.) In a notorious review, Rex Murphy complained that Fielding "just doesn't belong."1 Where, then, does this leave Smallwood?
Fielding's Condensed History unwrites D. W. Prowse's History of Newfoundland (both Prowse and his book haunt the novel) and Robert Hayman's Quodlibets, both of which it sets alongside fake folk ballads and a "lost" version of the national anthem. By contrast, Smallwood's narrative appears to be a model of thick-skulled narrative respectability. But forgery infects Smallwood's life as well: the forged letter that impels him to drop out of Bishop Feild College, the forged signature on his father's copy of Prowse's History, and, ultimately, his forged public persona. "But I never stopped believing, deep down, that these men were my betters, my true superiors," Smallwood says of the men he dominated during his life in politics, "nor, I now realize, did they" (85-86). Smallwood's non-meteoric but eventual rise to power comes accompanied by so many metaphorical pratfalls, not to mention real-life disasters, that at times the novel reads like a more realistic version of Robert Coover's The Public Burning. In fact, as Stan Dragland bluntly noted a few years ago, Johnston does not attempt to recreate Smallwood's life with any particular accuracy: "Well, Johnston didn't get it right. He didn't get Smallwood right, and he committed many other errors and distortions of Newfoundland history and geography."2 Given how important forgery and parody turns out to be, it's hardly surprising that Smallwood isn't "right." Still, that doesn't altogether account for Fielding.
Fielding, I would suggest, writes Smallwood. That is, whether or not Fielding "actually" writes Smallwood's autobiography, Smallwood's voice exists within Fielding's ironic worldview and not outside it. In terms of the novel's structure, this is actually the case: the first and last character we hear from is Fielding, not Smallwood. (Even then, we first have to get through two epigraphs from Prowse and a prefatory note from the author.) For that matter, Fielding remains at the center even when she is purportedly offstage, jibing at Smallwood in her op-eds. Under the circumstances, it is not too much to say that Fielding creates him. (This is practically a parody of bad fanfiction...) Dragland points out that Smallwood is a "pretender" (195), just like everyone else in the Condensed History. But we can go further: Smallwood's regime appears here as the logical sequel to the Condensed History. Herb Wyile comments that the Condensed History is Fielding's "revenge on a history that has cramped her style."3 Smallwood's--or "Smallwood's"--career appears to be more of the same. If Smallwood didn't exist, Fielding would have had to invent him.
1 Rex Murphy, rev. of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, rpt. in Points of View (New York: Random House, 2004), 49.
2 Stan Dragland, "The Colony of Unrequited Dreams: Romancing History?", Essays on Canadian Writing #182 (Spring 2004): 189 <web.ebscohost.com>. That being said, Dragland is mostly very positive about the novel's success as a fiction.
3 Herb Wyile, Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History (Montreal, Quebec and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), 132.
Ducklings, teenage version. (I spotted a new family yesterday, but didn't have my camera with me.)
When I was coming up with lost novelists in my previous post, I was thinking of authors who might somehow, somewhere, be brought out in (gasp) a well-edited paperback edition. After all, there's an off chance that a brave scholar might want to expose graduate students to Bulwer-Lytton. (The students would develop permanent immunity to Bulwer-Lytton from such an exposure, no doubt, but we can't have everything. Or maybe that is having everything.) But what about books for which there probably isn't a classroom market, even though intrepid scholars everywhere would be delighted to see them on their university library's shelves? In other words, the authors born and books made for something like the Pickering & Chatto editions.
My nominees:
A few posts down, a commenter asked about the fate of George Meredith. When I started graduate school, back in the murky mists of time (OK, 1992), Meredith-the-novelist had already been reduced to three books: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), Diana of the Crossways (1885), and The Egoist (1879). Those willing to stretch also included Beauchamp's Career (1875). I remember John Sutherland observing somewhere that you could always find Meredith for sale by the yard, which he thought was perhaps not such a good sign for Meredith's status. (The American equivalent must be James Whitcomb Riley. Walk into any antiquarian bookstore, and I swear you'll find the Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley gathering dust on a shelf and/or feeding the non-figurative bookworms.) As for the poetry, everybody read "Lucifer in Starlight" and Modern Love. A quick check on Amazon reveals that there's one novel available via Kindle, thanks to Penguin, but there isn't any hardcopy Meredith available from either Penguin (which had a quick go at The Egoist again a few years back) or Oxford. Of course, there's plenty of POD Meredith, which obviously has to change our definition of "what's in print," but there's also plenty of POD Emily Sarah Holt. I'm surprised that nobody has tried to resurrect Diana of the Crossways, at the very least.
A number of semi-forgotten Victorian novelists have been brought back to something resembling life in the past few years, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Amy Levy, Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Humphry Ward (although, to nobody's great shock, there hasn't been much of a run on Ward's Robert Elsmere), and Charlotte Yonge. Who else out there is suitable for editorial reanimation, at least for literary-historical purposes?
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: I don't know if I would wish a Bulwer-Lytton renaissance upon the world, exactly (I would probably be sentenced to everlasting torment if I did), but his influence is everywhere in nineteenth-century fiction. You could probably make a good case for an edition of The Last Days of Pompeii, and maybe Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram along with it.
Emily Lawless: A late-Victorian Anglo-Irish novelist, not forgotten among Irish studies specialists but certainly out of print in the US. Grania and Hurrish are the most highly-regarded novels, but With Essex in Ireland remains extremely readable (and has some genuinely shocking/scary moments in it).
Charles Reade: The quintessential "blue book" novelist. The Cloister and the Hearth is the obvious go-to book, but there's been a lot of recent interest in Hard Cash.
Mary Martha Sherwood: At the very least, a good edition of The History of the Fairchild Family, which has to be the most famous Victorian book (series of books, actually) that nobody has ever read. I vote for the first volume, which has all the notorious material ("Just
between that and the wood stood a gibbet, on which the body of a man
hung in chains: the body had not yet fallen to pieces, although it had
hung there some years. It had on a blue coat, a silk handkerchief round
the neck, with shoes and stockings, and every other part of the dress
still entire : but the face of the corpse was so shocking, that the
children could not look upon it").
Frances Trollope: Alan Sutton republished a few of her novels some time back, and Nonsuch also brought out Michael Armstrong, The Widow Barnaby (which appears to have gone out of print), and Jessie Phillips. The Widow Barnaby is actually quite funny and could stand another edition. (A more enterprising soul could bring out the entire Trollope family of novelists...)
Other suggestions?
I found Dr. No's post about the unbearable heaviness of excessive citations just as I was putting some citations into Book Two (which, amazingly enough, is really, truly near completion). Ah, the irony. My own attempts to go forth naked into the world--by which I mean not citing irrelevant secondary sources--have, alas, been stymied by readers. "Why aren't there any references to these two books?" (Because...they have nothing to say about this topic?) "Where's the discussion of this theoretical approach to hard-boiled eggs?" (Nowhere, because I'm writing about turkey bacon.) I might as well just put the citations in now and expect to delete them later...
James Robertson's The Testament of Gideon Mack is not a historical novel, precisely, but it is a novel haunted by the history of Scottish fiction. And, along those lines, it wonders how Scotland can tell its own story in a world that is, among other things, quite possibly deserted by God. The testament in question belongs to atheist minister Gideon Mack, who, we are told in the "editorial" frame narrative, has died under mysterious circumstances on Ben Alder. During his tenure in (the imaginary rural village) Monimaskit, Mack became a fundraising celebrity of sorts. However, when he falls into the legendary Black Jaws while trying to rescue a fellow minister's dog, Mack encounters the Devil himself. (The devil turns out to be a sympathetic fellow, if somewhat touchy.) When, in a parody of a revival preacher's spiel, Mack insists on testifying to his experience, the Church of Scotland--not to mention everyone else--denounces him as, to say the least, not entirely sane. This testament before us, then, constitutes Mack's final confession before he departs for his rendezvous with the Devil on Ben Alder.
As a child, Gideon Mack reads and rereads the novels of Sir Walter Scott--the only fiction that his father, a clergyman, has allowed to remain in the manse. And while Scott would not necessarily recognize The Testament of Gideon Mack as a historical novel, The Testament is nevertheless preoccupied with historical transformation and loss in a way that is very much Scott. As the 60s and 70s take hold, Mack's father fades away along with the Church's power; symptomatically, he suffers his first stroke after he catches Gideon watching Batman on the Sabbath. Television and film turn out to herald a new and increasingly global age, defined above all by America's cultural exports, America's wars, and America's money. "The sixties was an American decade," Gideon muses; "the Americans might have gone home after the war, but they were back in these years, influencing the form of music, books, art, fashion, social attitudes" (51). The result is classic Scott: characters become all too aware that the old ways are dissipating under the pressure of historical change. To what extent, then, is it possible to bridge the gap between "now" and a lost "then"? To some characters, this new global era seems to dissipate all human emotion, all sense of purpose, even all sense of politics. John, one of the historians in the novel, complains that "'[n]obody feels, nobody cares any more. There are no causes left. Even Scotland doesn't feel like a cause anybody's going to get angry about" (219). But John's pessimistic vision of a disenchanted world gone virtual, in which the cinema (220) supplants religion as the primary means of making personal meaning, does not hold sole sway over the novel. The arthritic (and marijuana-smoking) local historian Catherine Craigie proposes that the Mexican Day of the Dead might model a way for the living to commune with those who have gone. Despite being an atheist, Catherine wants to be buried with her family because her lost religion has nevertheless shaped her idendity. Meanwhile, the newfangled William Winnyford, who produces multimedia historical installations, argues that his work enables audiences to see "the world in which people live, bits of it that are always there but which they don't always pay attention to" (184). In this "multi-dimensional" (220) understanding of lived experience, there are moments that Winnyford calls "conjunctions," at which "space, time and narrative overlap" (185). For Winnyford, history always silently informs the present in unexpected and sometimes invisible ways; the gap between past and present remains, yet the past is simultaneously of the present as well. Depending on where we are in The Testament of Gideon Mack, any or all of these historical models may be in play.
The novel's unwillingness to "say what it means" on this subject suggests that it drifts along with modern Scotland, instead of regarding Scotland from some fixed point outside. It is not, in fact, clear where "outside" might be. According to the Devil, while both he and God used to have a "purpose," now they too are adrift: "Basically, I don't do anything any more. I despair, if you want the honest truth. I mean, the world doesn't need me. It's going to hell on a handcart, if you'll excuse the cliché, without any assistance from me" (295). While the Devil has stuck around, God has apparently "gone" (295). This is less a death-of-God thesis than a God-has-something-better-to-do-with-his-time thesis. God has apparently abandoned his creation to its own devices, leaving even the Devil to twiddle his thumbs aimlessly while he watches humanity implode. Given that this is the Prince of Lies who's speaking, the reader may wonder if we're to take the Devil straight, especially since he not only kept company with Gideon's father, but also may have been responsible for Gideon's college scholarship. Far from passively watching the Macks, the Devil appears to have been giving things a strategic nudge now and then. Moreover, it's worth noting that the Devil's thoughts aren't original to the Devil--his pessimistic view of an unmoored modernity lines up nicely with John's anger over lost "causes." And here is where Gideon's status as a wildly unreliable narrator comes in.
In and of themselves, unreliable narrators don't necessarily tell us anything interesting. Gideon's unreliability, however, goes straight to the novel's core questions: what story does modern Scotland want to tell about itself, and where will it find a model? By the time that the frame narrative is over, we have learned that a) Catherine Craigie has lied to Gideon; b) Gideon has lied about his affair with Elsie, to the point that nothing he says on the subject can be trusted at all; and c) Gideon's representation of William Winnyford is, at best, somewhat unfair. This calls everything else into question--like Gideon's encounter with the Devil. But for lack of a better word, Gideon's unreliability is structured by other fictions. The encounter with the Devil in the Black Jaws is partly inspired by a possibly faked bit of "traditional" lore (a fiction of a fiction inspiring a fiction in a work of fiction...). The narrative's sense of history, as I said, derives from Scott, as does the neo-Covenanter Peter MacMurray and even Gideon's own father (the "arms that reached almost to his knees" [51] echoes Rob Roy--James Mack comes up just a little short of Scott's hero). When he applies for the ministerial position at Monimaskit, Gideon's approach to the sermon is inspired by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (135). His death on Ben Alder comes out of his fondness for R. L. Stevenson. And, of course, there's Gideon rueful sense that he has failed to live up to his Biblical namesake. Implicitly or explicitly, Gideon's "testament" braids itself into other narratives; his unreliable voice in part ventriloquizes other, more "authoritative" speakers.
But Gideon never discusses the two most important influences on the testament. As this interview with Robertson notes, the novel's most obvious affiliations are with Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; nevertheless, Gideon never mentions the former (odd, since he's so enamoured of Stevenson), and the "editor" claims that there's no sign that he had read the latter (also odd) (355). The reader can tick off the influences as she goes: unreliable narrrator, hypocrisy, doubling, chain of textual transmission, Gideon's own initials/the Devil's name ("Gil Martin"), protagonist's decay from respectability to moral outcast, frame narrative (a crossover with Scott), and so on. Given Gideon's track record, it's possible that he suppresses his literary ancestors in order to establish his own narrative voice--a rejection of the past that, in good Gothic form, comes back to haunt the tale. Or, perhaps, Gideon's voice takes its form from novels that have entered the national consciousness--a forgotten past that nevertheless acts on the present. Or, within the world of the novel as a novel, literary ancestors themselves become "real"...
Ultimately, Gideon's great sin is to claim that he speaks the truth. After Catherine Craigie's unorthodox funeral, he assembles the mourners and tells "them everything that I have recorded here. I mean everything" (341). This moment of apparently perfect non-hypocrisy ignites a wild storm of speculation, anger, and disbelief; after all, who sees the Devil in twenty-first century Scotland? But the great difficulty, of course, is that "everything that I have recorded here" is unreliable--although, arguably, this problem no longer matters much by the end of the novel. In the end, what the novel captures is the end of a particular form of religious experience: meeting the Devil in twenty-first century Scotland no longer makes any sense, not even to those who actually believe that the Devil exists (e.g., Peter MacMurray [372]). Gideon's experience, whether or not he "really" had it, no longer makes sense as experience. It can only make sense as fiction. In that sense, Gideon winds up reclaimed by the novels that give shape to his voice.
DAD THE EMERITUS HISTORIAN OF GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT: You've been reading too much of Aristotle on Homer.
ME: You mean I started in medias res?
