Scattered Musings (occasionally academic)

• This is the second time in a week that I've innocently entered my campus office, only to be faced with a wasp buzzing around.  I object to wasps as a general rule, and object even more strongly to them when I'm trying to use my office.  It isn't clear if I've got wasps because there's a wasp nest located in close proximity to a vent somewhere (my windows are closed), or if I've got wasps because they are the reincarnated spirits of long-gone students, returning to complain further about their grades.
• I've sometimes noticed that my students think of the research-and-writing process as safely linear: you find a topic (hooray!), you read a lot of books (hooray?), and then you write the paper (exhausted hooray, trailing off into muttered discontent).  Of course, it never works that way, and so students sometimes think that any deviation from that path amounts to a grave spiritual crisis.  This summer has certainly offered some useful reminders that one's research can twist-and-turn out from under you in the most devious ways, whether it's in the discovery that topic X resists your proposed argument (the difficulties of writing about  "developments" in Victorian anti-Catholic sermons) or that topic Y suddenly throws up a problem requiring yet more books (the sudden realization that I needed to read a now-obscure, once-popular biograpy of Anne Boleyn in order to substantiate a claim).
• Apparently, there's yet another TV adaptation of Jane Eyre in the works, as if the world needed yet another adaptation of Jane Eyre.  (Incidentally, isn't Francesca Annis a little over-qualified for a two-bit character like Lady Ingram?) Even more so than many Victorian novels told in the first person--or, for that matter, many Victorian novels with strong narrative voices--JE is not at all suited to cinematic realism.  It's not just that the novel's literary effects depend on JE's very distinctive, complex POV, but also that its events themselves often seem bizarre or bathetic when rendered in "objective" form.  The "Red Room," the symbolic lightning bolt (when it's included), Rochester's "telepathic" connection to Jane, and so forth frequently appear uncomfortably comical--especially when, as is usually the case, the filmmaker strips the narrative of its theological underpinnings and turns it into a straightforward twentieth- or twenty-first century romance.  That being said, I think that in JE's case an overtly stylized or even surreal aesthetic might work in an adaptation's favor.
• Yesterday, I finished Brian Hall's I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, a fine historical novel in the realist tradition.  (By "in the realist tradition," I should add, I don't mean "not difficult": the chapters told from Sacagawea's and Charbonneau's POVs in particular require considerable attention, and the narrative sometimes doubles or triples back upon itself as POVs switch.)  Hall's postscript includes a nice definition of what the historical novelist can do--"The novelist's privilege is to play the fool, rushing in where historians fear from treading" (413)--which came to mind while I was reading Stuart Ferguson's "The Imaginative Construction of Historical Character: What Georg Lukacs and Walter Scott Could Tell Contemporary Novelists" [1].  Oddly enough, Ferguson's article--which, as you can probably gather from the title, argues that both Scott and Lukacs' interpretation thereof got historical characterization "right" the first time around--doesn't engage at all with the recent developments in historical fiction, but instead points fingers at novelists like the late Dorothy Dunnett and the equally late Ellis Peters (44).
• John Quiggin says of Thomas Carlyle that "while I was aware that Carlyle was (correctly) viewed by Fascists as a precursor of their ideas, and that his works were among Hitler’s favorite reading, I hadn’t derived the obvious corollary that his reputation would be revived, and his work celebrated, by postmodernists in the late 20th century."  Have I missed this memo? A very limited amount of Carlyle is amenable to postmodern thought--his interest in signification, for example, or in identity--but I haven't noticed any great enthusiasm for his politics.  As a grad student in the early-to-mid-90s, I was taught to regard Carlyle as basically a thug, albeit a highly influential (and therefore unavoidable) thug; my own students are usually appalled by Carlyle's definition of "liberty" in Past & Present.  Then again, I could just be reading the wrong people, which has certainly been known to happen.  (For previous grumping about non-Victorianists and Carlyle, see this entry from January '06;  one of the first strong attempts to make a case for Carlyle as fascist was J. Salwyn Shapiro, "Thomas Carlyle, Prophet of Fascism," Journal of Modern History 17.2 [June 1945]: 97-115 [available via JSTOR]). 
  

[1] Stuart Ferguson, "The Imaginative Construction of Historical Character: What Georg Lukacs and Walter Scott Could Tell Contemporary Novelists," Scottish Studies Review 6.2 (Autumn 2005): 32-47. 

Comments

[Overread]

I'm not very optimistic about the Jane Eyre movie either. Isn't Rochester supposed to be... um... not quite a Hollywood-leading-man-looking kinda guy? Maybe they should try it as a Tim Burton claymation film.

[Bourgeois Nerd]

The guy who's going to play Rochester is in EVERYTHING! He sure knows how to keep busy.

What I love most about that list of actors is that most of them have appeared in one version or another of an Agatha Christie adaptation.

[John Quiggin]

As is obvious from the post, my knowledge of the literature on Carlyle is limited, to put it mildly. So feel free to set me straight.

My comment was based on his entry in Wikipedia, which states "This association with fascism did Carlyle's reputation no good in the post-war years, but "Sartor Resartus" has recently been recognised once more as a unique masterpiece, anticipating many major philosophical and cultural developments, from Existentialism to Postmodernism. " Google seems to support this, pointing to this paper which describes Carlyle as a "proto-postmodernist" (this is imputed to Trevor Hogan, but I couldn't chase the reference).

My willingness to accept this reflects the similarity between Carlyle and Carl Schmitt, who certainly has ben rehabilitated, despite being an outright Nazi. Both Schmitt and Carlyle, it seems to me, are muddled obscurantists, with whom power-worship passes for clarity of thought.

[Miriam]

The article you're looking for is Trevor Hogan's "The Religion of Thomas Carlyle" in Linda Woodhead, ed., Reinventing Christianity (Ashgate).

There's Carlyle scholarship in toto, postmodernist interpretations of Carlyle, and interpretations of C as a proto-postmodernist (e.g., Rainer Emig's "Eccentricity Begins at Home: Carlyle's Centrality in Victorian Thought"). The field is fairly vast--MLA pulls up over 500 articles and books published in the past two decades, most of them thematic or contextual studies--and I feel rather hesitant about generalizing about what the "postmodernists" are or are not doing. Obviously, there's still enthusiasm for C in less salubrious and non-postmodernist circles (a search for "Carlyle" and "fascism" certainly pulled up some icky links).

[John Quiggin]

Thanks for this, Miriam. One of the great things about blogging is that a snarky aside can lead to learning all sorts of things I'd normally never even think about.

[bob]

One thing that has endeared Carlyle to many fascists, both in Hitler's time and now (especially in Britain), is his anti-Semitism, which was pretty bad. And he anticipated other fascist values, notably hero worship, authoritarianism, and nationalism. But it should be said that fascism operates in a particular social context for a particular reason: it occurs at moments of great social crisis and serves the big capitalists by diverting the masses from class consciousness and socialist revolution, mobilizing them instead around a cluster of themes that appeal to their wounded narcissism. Clearly, this wasn't Carlyle's agenda. What he was, I think, was a reactionary utopian, a Romantic (born the same year as Keats) who lived too long into the very bourgeois 19C.

[Snork Maiden]

Alice Chandler certainly saw Carlyle as a Romantic/medievalist in 'A Dream of Order', although she does trace his romanticism in part to his readings of the Germanic Romanticists which I guess would tie in with certain elements of Nazism.