The Little Professor

Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones

Wherein the Reader will find a Feminist Revision of John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (a.k.a. Fanny Hill) and William Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress; together with numerous Allusions to Daniel Defoe's Roxana and Moll Flanders, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and John Gay's The Beggar's Opera; with Appearances by such Noted Figures as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Anne Bonny; and offering many Adventures, Escapes, Sex Scenes, and Capitalized Nouns.

*cough*

I wanted to like this book more than I did. In fact, I wanted to like the book, period. Alas, no such luck. Erica Jong, who started out as a specialist in eighteenth-century literature, clearly immersed herself in the period, and we have the usual stops on the tour: country houses, brothels, Newgate, ships, and so forth. We also have Wiccans. And sex. A lot of sex. Icky sex. Plus some familiar-sounding Reflections on the Evils of Mankind and the Need for Equality.

The hindrances to my enjoyment were as follows:

1) Look, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is not a good book. Did the world really need a rewrite?
2) Did I mention that the sex was icky? I mean, I could have done without Captain Whitehead's, um, predilections. Where's the Bad Sex Prize when you need it?
3) Maybe I've just read too much neo-18th c. fiction, but the book's representation of early Hanoverian England was predictable. Filth? Check. Carnivalesque? Check. Rakes? Check. Neo-18th c. fiction (and film, for that matter) so often seems stuck in Hogarthian mode. I understand the temptation, but it eventually becomes repetitive. (Incidentally, David Dabydeen's A Harlot's Progress offers a more complex take on Hogarth's series, told from the point of view of the African slave in #2.)

Or perhaps it's just that I read Jong too soon after Boyle and Powers.

Blast! Where's that reference?

Somewhere in his biography of Benjamin Disraeli, Robert Blake argues that those unenthused by D would use the older spelling "D'Israeli" to play up his Jewish background. (Changing names seems to have been family routine.) George MacDonald Fraser borrows this idea in Flash for Freedom!

But where does Blake say this? The great name question isn't in the index. I was hoping I'd find it somewhere in the vicinity of a reference to Charles Greville (to whom Fraser also points), but no luck. Any other D enthusiasts know what I'm talking about? Or am I remembering a different biography? I don't think so, though.

Distractions

In order to preserve my sanity while overdosing on (Scottish) Victorian anti-Catholic propaganda, I read some contemporary fiction:

• Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing. There's so much going on here that this novel really deserves a blog post to itself; I certainly haven't yet thought through the relationship between its fragmentary, non-linear narrative structure and its theoretical disquisitions on time, for example. (The novel begins at the end and ends at the beginning; along the way, there's at least one event which takes place at the wrong time, as it were.) Along with time, the novel takes on the meaning of racial identity; the relationship between high culture--especially music--and history; and, indeed, the question of what constitutes history in the first place. "Race" in this novel is both unstable and fixed: physicist David Strom, a Jew who loses his entire family to the Holocaust, is simultaneously "white" and "non-white"; his wife Delia is African-American, but, as we are reminded more than once, she too has white ancestry. They try to raise their three children beyond race, a concept that makes sense neither to Delia's father (who argues that only whites can afford to erase race) nor to anyone else the younger Stroms encounter (who insist on categorizing them as one or the other). David and Delia attempt to force open a historical space for their children; their eldest, Jonah, a singer of preternatual power, turns to earlier and earlier music in order to find some moment "before" race, while their youngest, Ruth, becomes a radical. Joseph, the narrator, tries to find a middle ground for himself. As Joseph acknowledges, both he and his brother tend to miss what, in retrospect, are seminal events. The crucial exceptions, however, are the Watts and Rodney King riots; Jonah, the one who tries to immerse himself in the European past, finds himself magnetically drawn to them. Although, in the 1950s and 1960s, Jonah had worked spirituals and other African-American songs into his concerts, the violence of the riots promises access to a world he otherwise studiously avoids--but there's no room for him there, either. (He's assaulted both times.) Certainly, one of the novel's running questions is: to what extent can you make your place in history, given that the world is full of people making places for themselves as well? It's a gripping work, although it probably could have used some sterner editing.

  
  

• T. Coraghessan Boyle, Water Music. This is and isn't a picaresque historical novel about the explorer Mungo Park, interspersed with the life of petty crook Ned Rise. It is, in the sense that the novel is about Park's travels, but it isn't, in the sense that the novel is flagrantly and jubilantly anachronistic. (References to twentieth-century slang and literature abound; even some of the eighteenth-century events aren't quite in the right place.) The most sensible character in the novel is Park's guide on his first trip, the emancipated slave Johnson (a.k.a. Katunga Oyo, a.k.a. Isaaco), who at one point dryly and accurately points out that Park is an "ass." Park is, indeed, a fool--a genuinely driven fool, but a fool nonetheless--and Boyle is intrigued by the process that turns both Park and his travels into fodder for legend. The novel's cheerful disregard for historical accuracy echoes both Park's self-mythologizing and Ned Rise's ongoing and farcically unsuccessful attempts to invent new criminal identities for himself. While respecting Park's genuine passion for exploration, Boyle has fun with the mercenary and prurient motives that fund his adventures. I think this novel is what's called a "romp," and often wished that Boyle could have varied the tone somewhat. Still, most of the time it's undeniably funny.

  
  

• Sarah Smith, Chasing Shakespeares (see its webpage for the footnotes). This was the least successful of the three novels I read, not least because it's not really a novel. While it has some occasionally thoughtful things to say about class differences in academia--our narrator is a country boy doing graduate work at Northeastern; he becomes enmeshed with a rich girl from Harvard--most of the narrative consists of a long exposition of the Oxford thesis. The blurb overreaches quite a bit when it compares Smith's novel to Byatt's Possession. It was a quick read, but struck me as rather superficial. (If you're really interested in the "authorship problem," several of the novel's claims are indirectly refuted at the Shakespeare Authorship Page.)
  

This Week's Acquisitions

• Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield (Grove Weidenfeld, 1991). A woman's discovery about her father leads her to reexamine her own life.

• Dan Simmons, Ilium (Eos, 2003). It's the Trojan War! On Mars!

• George Macbeth, Dizzy's Woman (Jonathan Cape, 1986). A series of imaginary letters from Disraeli to Lady Londonderry, with some attention to the Eglinton Tournament.

• Michael Frayn, Spies (Metropolitan, 2002). During WWII, two boys play at espionage, only to discover (they think) a real spy in the family.

• Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (MIT, 1996). Argues for an eighteenth-century shift from visual to textual pedagogical practices.

• Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, eds., Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago, 1998). Scientific bodies (literally).

• Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford, 2000). Theorizes that the modern definition of "culture" emerged from conflicts over the role of Jews in nineteenth-century Anglo-American society and literary production.

• Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (California, 1998). Examines the implications of debates over sati for colonial historiography.

• Frederic J. Baumgartner, Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). General survey from the beginnings to the present day.

• Susan Juster and Lisa MacFarlane, eds., A Mighty Baptism: Race, Gender, and the Creation of American Protestantism (Cornell, 1996). Preaching, conversion, hymnody, activism, etc.

• Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (Columbia, 1999). Beckford, Coleridge, Damer, Bannerman, Cowper, etc.

• Jean Miller Schmidt, Grace Sufficient: A History of Women in American Methodism 1760-1939 (Abingdon, 1999). Private lives, work in the church, missionary activities, etc.

• Jacques Ranciere, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minnesota, 1994). Challenges of historical narrative, including the role of fiction.

• Stephen Coote, Royal Survivor: The Life of Charles II (St. Martin's, 2001). England's most entertaining king?

Of reading many journal volumes

I managed to survive nearly eighteen volumes of The Bulwark or Reformation Journal. You know you're dealing with one seriously anti-Catholic publication when it twice accuses Charles Kingsley of being too nice to Catholics. Most of the journal's issues consist of anecdotes about the latest in Catholic malfeasance, accompanied by obsessive articles on the Maynooth Grant, Ritualism, reformatory schools, and, of course, convents. Oddly enough, there were surprisingly few essays that had anything to do with the Reformation--which was a tad annoying, since that's what I was looking for in the first place--but, as I mentioned in the previous post, there was certainly plenty of rotten poetry.

Incidentally, has anyone come up with a scientific name for the physical trauma brought on by several hours in rare book rooms? My back, ouch.

Back home tomorrow, then on a plane again next week for Dad the Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt's retirement party. In the middle, I have to talk to a student about his MA thesis, sign off on my annual report, and finish an article.

Definitely not a future research project

Although I've got a hard-won reputation for being able to read and write about anything--sermons by fifth-rate Victorian preachers, long didactic novels by Calvinists, derivative popular biographies, conduct manuals--I think I've finally met my match. In my future career, I will never, ever write an article about poetry in The Bulwark or Reformation Journal. Good heavens. I've never had the misfortune to read so many flubbed iambic tetrameters and wacky slant rhymes. Here are a couple of stanzas from a poem entitled "The Doom of Rome":

There was a time—‘tis even now—
It was in ancient days,
It was when slaughter’d thousands fell;
It cannot last always.

There was a time when morning dawn’d
Upon the Saviour’s tomb—
A dark and empty sepulcher;
Mark this, O Papal Rome!

The rest of the magazine isn't much of an improvement. Still, I'm finding some useful articles, as well as inspiration for a Cliopatria post about Benjamin Disraeli. Seven volumes down and eleven to go. (If you feel a desperate longing to sample some of the Bulwark's deathless prose, you can try here.)

I'm going to have to take a pass on the Strand (luckily for my pocketbook), but I did enjoy my trip to Labyrinth Books. Oh, and the Union Theological Seminary's bookstore is having a sale.

In other news, an invisible one became visible. I was worried that my eyes might melt, but all's well.

Scattered Musings

• New York, New York: I'm off to NYC tomorrow, where with any luck the books I need will actually be on the shelves. (With my usual good timing, I managed to schedule my trip to coincide with the library moving all its rare periodicals to new locations.) When not reading books in libraries, I'll be looking at books in the Strand and Labyrinth Books. And I'm also supposed to be "led by an invisible hand" to, if not "the necessaries of life," then at least lunch.

• Nature. Now it's in the kitchen. Couldn't it stay outside and leave the cat food alone?

• Perdido Street Station. It's been a while since I've read novel-length SF or fantasy, but I've started to accumulate steampunk fiction, and this seems to qualify--albeit in its own gloriously twisted way. It's only fitting that a novel obsessed with hybridity and rot should be so difficult to classify. PSS assembles a fascinating alternative world that sure looks suspiciously like late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century London ("Bentham Rudgutter"?), although the plot starts decaying, sort of like the city, after a few hundred pages. Like a lot of other people, I'm not altogether happy with the abrupt ending, which didn't deal adequately with the moral issues it raised. Still, the novel was an absorbing and sometimes provocative read. Should I go get a copy of The Scar?

• Jury-rigging. I somehow have to get both Man and Superman and Nickled and Dimed into the same honors course. ("Children, our unifying theme is...titles with conjunctions in them!" Uh-huh.)

• Getting longer. I'm desperately attempting to beat an introduction into submission, and appear to be failing. First it was 3 1/2 pages; now it's 5. Therefore, I was oddly consoled by Charles Webb Le Bas' life of Wycliffe (1832), seeing as how its introduction ends on page 89. (For more Le Bas, see this enthusiastic review by the still-Anglican Newman.)

Ah, nature

Nature is scurrying around my dining room.

It was most certainly not invited.

Two good parodies

1. At Making Light: Harry of the Five Points. Shakespeare's Henry V channeled through (oh dear) Damon Runyon. The French is priceless.

2. Troy in Fifteen Minutes. So much better than the film. (Via Metafilter.)

Unteachable

C-18 L has an interesting discussion thread going on about unteachable texts and authors (archived here; scroll down to "Teaching..."). Coincidentally, the subject came up again last night at a retirement party. I usually joke that the world contains three kinds of books--namely, the good, the fun, and the interesting. You can teach good and fun, but interesting should be saved for one's own research.

In my admittedly limited experience--six years of teaching--what usually has apocalyptic results?

• Anything with lots of topical references. Alexander Pope's The Dunciad is absolutely hilarious, but the footnotes drive students up the wall. As I've mentioned before, Byron's Don Juan causes angst for similar reasons (and, as a Romanticist pointed out last night, it just goes on for soooo long...). Has anyone ever tried teaching Thomas Love Peacock?

• Help! Rhetoric! Style! Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France induces great pain and suffering. Don't even get me started about what happens when students first encounter anything by Thomas Carlyle (and you can't avoid Carlyle when teaching the Victorians). Of the poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins always goes over badly with all but the most advanced and/or sophisticated undergraduates.

• It's long! My students always love short Robert Browning, but they consistently loathe long Robert Browning.

• Can that narrator! A lot of students object strenuously to didactic or otherwise interventionist narrators, which often lands George Eliot in hot water.

As several contributors to the thread have pointed out, it's possible to overcome some of these problems with extensive preparation. George Eliot works best when students have had a semester to think about narrative strategies in Victorian fiction. Sometimes judicious editing helps as well--short snippets of Burke, for example, rather than The Whole Darned Thing.