The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• M.D., Bolsover Castle: A Tale from Protestant History of the Sixteenth Century (Short & Co.; John Hatchard, 1846).  Anti-Catholic historical novel about Arabella Stuart.  More information on the titular (and still-standing) castle here. 
• Jane Spencer, Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon, 1660-1830 (OUP, 2005).  Links between ideas of kinship and different concepts of literary tradition.  I'm reviewing it for Choice. 

Murderous

Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt called my attention to this clever Sherlock Holmes parody by Arnold Bennett.  The site hosts several other Holmes parodies; see also this extensive listing of pastiched Holmeses.  Personally, I'm quite fond of J. M. Barrie's "The Adventure of the Two Collaborators."

Model

About three years ago or so, Choice sent me this little book to review.  I sharpened my figurative pencil, ensconced myself on my monastic futon, and went to work.  And promptly became very irritated.  Nuttall's book is an attack on contemporary scholarly methods, dressed in the sheep's clothing of a study of the scholar's image--in practice, Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, and versions thereof.  Nuttall is a well-known Renaissance scholar; he is not a well-known Victorianist.  I, however, am a Victorianist, if hardly a well-known one, and my sense of relative inferiority (I'm only a poor junior faculty member! poor me!) ran headlong into the aforementioned irritation.  Because it is indeed very irritating to be lectured on scholarly methods by someone who did not feel the need to read up on the appropriate scholarship.  Thus, we have some rather ill-advised arguments about Browning's "A Grammarian's Funeral," unaccompanied by any awareness of the (much earlier) critics who have explained why such arguments are ill-advised.  We have a chapter that reinvents someone else's wheel, without any acknowledgment that the wheel exists.  We have a spectacularly missed connection, one glaringly obvious to many Victorianists (especially Victorianists aware of the overlooked wheel).  And so forth.  This, I admit, made (and makes) me cranky. 

I don't aspire to the new title of The Little Cranky Professor.  Still, I offer this anecdote to suggest why this sort of post makes me...antsy.  My own forays into young fogeyness have not, I think, been especially happy, and so I am trying mightily to restrain myself when I feel an attack coming on.  The question remains, however: if we're going to undertake some sort of critique of some sort of scholarship for which we feel some sort of disdain, what are our responsibilities?  Well, actually reading the material would be a start, I suppose.  But I also feel very strongly that a critique of scholarship that does not itself model appropriate scholarly practice has already shot itself in the foot.   More and more, I find myself drawn to those who critique only in the process of offering a positive alternative--Marianne Thormahlen, for example, whose book on the Brontes manages to offer the most politely devastating rebuttal of a certain type of feminist criticism I've ever seen. 

Eyeballed

On Tuesday, I innocently set off to acquire my new contact lenses.  Alas, the optometrist had other plans.  After studying my right eye for a few moments, he wanted to know why it was scratched.  This information, I must say, came as news.  Normally, this is the sort of thing one notices--you know, eyeball, skritch, ow--but apparently, I somehow managed to scratch myself up without feeling anything.  I'm talented that way, I guess.  In any event, the optometrist asked me not to wear my right contact lens until after my second checkup on Thursday.

Now, I'm practically blind with my contacts out, which is what happens when your vision is approximately 20/1200.  (Translation: Eye chart? There's an eye chart over there? Come to think of it, there's a wall over there?) Worse still, I haven't been able to wear glasses since I switched to RGP contacts in college; apparently, this is not an uncommon problem.  And so, I've spent the past two days seeing 20/20 out of one eye and 20/1200 out of the other.  As I explained to my students today, I wasn't ignoring anybody sitting to my right--it's just that they were, you know, not there.   Not surprisingly, some students thought that being invisible might be a good thing...

Me and who else?

Inspired by the OCLC Top 1000, below, I decided to amuse myself by identifying the Burstein LibraryThing Top 25: the books I shared with the most people.

1. Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1346)
2. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1175)
3. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1035)
4. Bronte, Jane Eyre (952)
5. Huxley, Brave New World (934)
6. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (919)
7. Homer, The Odyssey (916)
8. Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (885)
9. Bronte, Wuthering Heights (862)
10. Strunk, The Elements of Style (846)
11. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (828)
12. Austen, Emma (763)
13. Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (740)
14. Nabokov, Lolita (734)
15. Austen, Sense and Sensibility (721)
16. Pullman, The Golden Compass (710)
17. Shelley, Frankenstein (701)
18. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (653)
19. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (651)
20. Golding, Lord of the Flies (643)
21. Dickens, Great Expectations (642)
22. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist (631)
23. Joyce, Ulysses (611)
24. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (600)
25. Carroll, The Annotated Alice (591) and Stoker, Dracula (591)

19th C. British Meets the New Top 1000

How is my line of work doing in the new OCLC Top 1000? (Note: I've only counted books published during the nineteenth century, not nineteenth-century authors per se.  Hence, for example, no Hound of the Baskervilles.) 

Some observations:

• Only six books of poetry made the list, of which two (A Child's Garden of Verses and The Owl and the Pussycat) are children's verse.  E. B. Browning,  Housman, Scott, and Tennyson are represented by one volume each; no sign of the Romantic Big Six (Coleridge is aboard for The Rime, which came out in 1798), while Arnold and R. Browning are similarly absent at the Victorian end. 
• Darwin contributed two of the five nonfiction works to make the list, with the other three supplied by Carlyle, Mill, and Newman.  Much to my bemusement, the Carlyle in question is The French Revolution.  Again, no Arnold.
• Not surprisingly, the Victorians dominate the novel selections, with the only Romantic novelists on offer being Austen, Scott (only one novel), and M. Shelley.  Also not surprisingly, Dickens leads the way with sixteen novels, although Austen is represented by the entirety of her adult output.  Some very popular Victorian novelists, like Trollope and Bulwer-Lytton, manage a single novel apiece. 

The Salt Roads

Nalo Hopkinson's The Salt Roads is a multiplot fantasy-cum-historical novel, featuring Ezili, a Haitian goddess; Jeanne Duval,  the mistress of Charles Baudelaire; Mer, a slave on Saint Domingue (later Haiti); and Thais/Meritet, the "real" Saint Mary of Egypt.   Unlike the parallel-plot novels I've discussed here before, the characters in this novel do not go through uncanny repetitions of their precursors' lives, although the three mortal women echo each other in names (Mer/Jeanne Lemer/Meritet), social status (slavery, prostitution), experiences (Mer's mystical "stroke," Jeanne's more prosaic one), and sexual transgressiveness (lesbianism or bisexuality, enthusiastic prostitution, various forms of gender-bending play).  Through the mind-hopping Ezili, who "swims" through time and space, the novel's multiple strands exist simultaneously, suggesting that all three characters are, in some sense, plural aspects of a single woman.  As Ezili says, "[n]ot for me the progression in a straight line from earliest to latest.  Time eddies.  I am now then, now there, sometimes simultaneously" (42).  It's not surprising, then, that the final woman to appear is Thais, even though she is, chronologically, the first. 

Some reviewers found the novel incoherent; Jayme Lynn Blaschke notes, for example, that "[t]here's little balance among the main narrative threads."  Gregory E. Rutledge (PDF) though, is onto something when it comes to genre: "It is, depending on one's critical preference, an historical novel, neo-slave narrative, or allegory of a slave narrative situated within the space probed by some of the very best Black women's authors."  The three women's plots each rewrite a different kind of narrative.  Mer's plot, as Rutledge suggests, is a neo-slave narrative, one in which the slaves can speak with their gods and transform themselves into animals.  While this plot is defined by Mer's failure to avert history, it more generally reinvents historical agency: the famous rebel leader Makandal, for example, isn't manipulating Vodou "superstition," because Vodou actually works.  By contrast, Thais' story unwrites Christian hagiography.  Empiricism fails to explain the Haitian rebellion; Christianity fails to explain or contain Meritet, who pointedly wanders "off-message" at the end of her narrative (and, for that matter, of the novel).  Sandwiched in the middle, in realist mode, Jeanne Duval returns from the margins of Charles Baudelaire's life--the minor character made major.  (This plot may also be a nod in the direction of Angela Carter's story about Jeanne, "Black Venus.")

Unlike Mer's story, which does not conclude at all, and Meritet's, whose story fails to conclude "properly," Jeanne's ends with her death.  In a way, that's only logical, since Jeanne is the one truly historical character here.   Mer is a fiction of the female slave who has no recorded voice.  Meritet is a fiction who acts as the historical underbelly of a sanctified fiction; the novel's Meritet, paradoxically, becomes a fiction putatively more true than the hagiographical truth.  And Jeanne is a fiction who, like Mer, gives voice to someone known primarily through someone else's voice, and who, like Meritet, is also the "reality" behind a series of poems, photographs, and fragmentary accounts.  Even when the novel most obviously looks like conventional historical fiction--its interpolation of documents and letters included--it thus reminds us that the history involved is itself imaginative play. 

Things that should not be surprises

I'm still thinking about the recently-dispatched paper on the Marian persecutions, which at some point will resurface (in completely different fashion) as a book chapter.  As I noted during the Q&A afterwards, I had originally planned to put "Catholic" and "Protestant" arguments/representations--obviously, those are convenient but oversimplified categories--into some sort of roughly equal dialogue.  But I couldn't do that, because the dialogue was completely one-sided.  The Catholic minority, whether of Ultramontanist or Cisalpine tendency, kept reasonably well-abreast of what their Protestant counterparts were saying; the Protestant majority, whether High Church, evangelical, or Dissenting, kept reasonably well-abreast of what John Lingard was saying, along with a few other very high-profile figures.  In retrospect, this imbalance shouldn't have startled me at all, and not just because of the respective demographics involved.  While I don't know how accurate J. H. Newman was when he claimed that Catholics were far better informed about Protestant theology than Protestants were about Catholic theology (although it would have been hard for Victorian Protestants to be less well-informed about Catholic theology...), it's true that Victorian Catholics were, for obvious reasons, heavily invested in seeking out and disproving anti-Catholic discourse.  (The late-Victorian Catholic Truth Society pamphlets are a case in point--they're a great way of finding obscure anti-Catholic polemicists.)  The actively anti-Catholic Protestant contingent, meanwhile, apparently felt no need to go hunting for lesser-known Catholic writers--and in their minds, there was probably no reason that they should. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Mary McGarry Morris, The Lost Mother (Viking, 2005).  Children seek their mother during the Great Depression. 

LP on the West Coast

Despite some unnecessary drama--the cab company lost my 4:45 AM reservation and I made it to the airport 29 minutes before the plane was scheduled to depart--I managed to arrive in sunny Orange County alive, if exhausted.  Now I'm cheerfully established with Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt, Mom the Retired School Administrator, and their two felines.  Next order of business: delivering my paper this afternoon.  It would have been nice if the conference had actually been at UCI, not a nearby hotel, but one can't have everything (like, I assume, rooms for confer-ees during the quarter). 

UPDATE: Both I and the audience appear to have survived the various burnings, etc., leaving to one side my mispronunciation of an author's name.  Sigh.  One attendee has apparently decided to converse with (lecture?) all three of us panelists individually, so I await corrections meekly.  The conference appears to be quite small, with only about forty or fifty people present today; I only knew one person, one of my undergraduate profs from UCI.