The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions (slightly delayed)

(Both books were gifts from Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt.)

• David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (U of California, 2007).  Studies the diverging theological and cultural functions of blood in the two religions traditions.
• Akihito Suzuki, Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England, 1820-1860 (U of California, 2006).  Home treatment for the insane during the Victorian period. 

"The Martyr's Hymn"

While I came up short on poetry about Reformation martyrs (or short stories, for that matter), today's trip through some annuals did yield a representative example of popular religious poetry.  The anonymous author is "A Clergyman."

OH, no! we may not whisper now
The name by hosts ador'd;
No more we chant in choral song
Our dear redeeming Lord!

They drag us slow with bleeding feet
To many an idol shrine;
They bid us taste the offer'd meat,
Or quaff the offer'd wine:

They strive with slow reluctant fires
Our constant souls to break;
They spread the charms the world admires--
But, oh, 'tis death to take.

For neither bright Apollo's bow,
Nor Daphne's laurel grove,
Nor shades of joy, nor sights of wo,
Can swerve our holy love.

Yet, if perchance by sorrow tried,
Some sighs our bosoms heave;
They bid us leave the Crucified--
But we will never leave!

Oh, no! the quivering limb may throb,
May start the furtive tear:
For crown of steel and fiery robe
Are hard for flesh to bear:

But heavier was the robe of scorn
The Man of Sorrows wore
And sharper, sharper was the thorn
On bleeding brows he bore;

And He can cool the torrent wave,
Can stop the oppressor's joy--
Oh! stronger is His arm to save
Than theirs is to destroy.

They tell us He is buried now,
And all our hopes are gone;
They saw not how in vest of snow
He mounted to his throne!

And chains may bind, and prisons dim
Our fetter'd limbs control--
Our souls, like eagles, fly to Him,
They cannot bind the soul.

The waves that wash our prison wall,
The winds that hurry by,
The sweat, the gall, are records all
Of love that cannot die.

A Clergyman.  "The  Martyr's Hymn."  The Christian Keepsake, and Missionary Annual.  Ed.  William Ellis.  London & Paris: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1836.  122-23.  (Reprinted in the US, without the elisions, in 1847.)

What can we say about this poem, besides the fact that it's in common meter (alternating iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter)?

The collective speaking voice can just barely be grounded in the earliest age of the church, thanks to the classical references in the fourth quatrain, the "idol shrine" in the second, and Christ's apparently recent death in the ninth.  But the poet has left his readers the opportunity to interpret the poem allegorically; the idols, for example, could just as well be worldly temptations or even "false" (i.e., non-Protestant) forms of Christianity, just as the physical tortures in stanza three could easily become psychological.   In effect, the poem both celebrates historical martyrs and provides a blueprint for early-Victorian Christians to interpret their own (perhaps far more petty) sufferings as minor martyrdoms in their own right.  The reader speaks with the poem's "we."

But that collective "we" is important for another reason.  The first quatrain emphasizes the loss of the worshipper's voice, both individually ("whisper") and as a group (the "chant").  A Christian community defined in the act of speaking and singing Christ's name gives way in quatrains two and three to one rendered entirely passive, subjected to the commands of the unnamed (but presumably pagan) "They."  "They" seek to reabsorb the collective speaker back into themselves, to contaminate the speaker (with pleasures of the flesh or of false worship) so that the distinctive difference of his/her voice vanishes.  Nevertheless, the fifth quatrain triumphantly reasserts the collective speaker as an agent, thanks to his/her appropriation of the verb "leave" from that evil "they."  It's no accident that the same quatrain returns to the figure of Christ--whom the speaker was initially forced to leave unnamed.   

Once Christ reenters the poem, the apparently binary opposition (they vs. us) gives way.  While the sixth quatrain offers the poem's most graphic images of suffering, underlined by the eye rhyme (tear/bear), the poet introduces them only to subordinate them to Christ's ultimate suffering.  In turn, the poet immediately juxtaposes Christ's passion to His limitless power--Christ as, in effect, the verb to end all verbs.  With that in mind, the ninth quatrain introduces a new split between the speaker and "they," based on witnessing: "their" language ("tell") relegates Christ to the past, a claim that inverts the lost acts of worship in the first quatrain; but "we" saw Christ's ascension.  The speaker's triumphant witnessing therefore sets up the final two quatrains, which celebrate the victory of soul over body and of "we" over "they."  But the final quatrain makes an even stronger claim: some of the most ephemeral elements of both the body and the nature become, paradoxically, a permanent historical record of perfect Christian love (a paradox emphasized by the internal rhyme on gall/all in the penultimate line).  Instead of being silenced, then, the martyr's celebration of Christ voices itself eternally.

LP at NYPL (A)

Yesterday, I spent several hours helping my mother find relatives (or, in my case, not find relatives) in the archives; today, I poked about in the NYPL, locating some Christian literary annuals to read.   I'm looking for bad Victorian poetry about martyrs, in case you're wondering.  (This is not to rule out the possibility of good Victorian poetry about martyrs, but in my experience, such poetry has been...thin on the ground.  Or page.)   Afterwards, we looked at the library's commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Milton's birth, which included a number of first editions and several engravings by Blake, Gillray, and Medina, among others.  Tomorrow, more NYPL, plus perhaps a trip to the Strand. 

LP in NYC

I'm ensconced in a midtown hotel, awaiting the arrival of Mom the Retired School Administrator.  (Luckily, both of us are capital-L "Little," because this hotel room, while clean, seems best suited for Lilliputians.)  She's looking for various documents relating to long-deceased relatives; I'm cheerleading (?) and reading some Christian periodicals at the New York Public Library, where I've never worked before.  Also on the agenda: dinner with several cousins, two of whom I've never met. 

Brief note: The Somnambulist

Any author who starts a novel by warning us that "[t]his book has no literary merit whatsoever" (1) is, to say the least, pushing his luck.  Jonathan Barnes' The Somnambulist at first looks like it belongs to that mini-subgenre, the historical novel--with or without fantasy elements--about magicians (e.g., The Prestige, Carter Beats the Devil).  Instead, it turns out to be a Mulligan's stew of a parody.  At various points, the novel skewers neo-Victorian fiction (actually, it's set shortly after Queen Victoria's death, which I suppose makes it neo-post-Victorian, or maybe neo-Edwardian...), the detective novel, the Dan Brown-esque thriller, and apocalypto-fic.  The dj tells us that Barnes has a first in English from Oxford, and he tosses in allusions to an equally jumbled assortment of authors and texts, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Mary Shelley, and Wilkie Collins.   

It's impossible to really summarize the deliberately nutty plot; let's just say that it involves Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Pantisocracy, various and sundry murders, and the possible destruction of London.  The protagonist, Edward Moon, is a down-on-his-luck magician who also has a once-lucrative sideline in detective work.  The titular Somnambulist, who assists Moon in his act, is also a weird golem of sorts who chugs milk endlessly and can't be harmed with swords.  Together, they investigate crimes--badly, it would appear.  (Enter parody of the detective novel.)  Along the way, they have dealings with a number of Secret Societies That Run Everything, including the mysterious Directorate and the equally mysterious Vigilance Committee; moreover, it turns out that the British Library hosts a blind and omniscient Archivist, her existence secret to all but a privileged few, who Knows All.  (Enter parody of Dan Brown.)  Moon stumbles onto a secret church organization that wants to institute Coleridge's Pantisocracy by putting an end to London as we know it.  (Enter apocalypto-fic.)  Unfortunately, things get gummed up quite badly, especially thanks to a pair of supernatural hired assassins who dress up as school boys.  (Enter...um, actually, I haven't the slightest clue what that could possibly be, although it's certainly a different take on the Eton school story.)  All of this is ornamented with a weird gentleman's club, the Underground, and a brothel featuring badly-deformed prostitutes.  (Enter the neo-Victorian novel.) 

The novel's best feature is probably its spectacularly unreliable narrator, who always tells the "absolute, unalloyed truth" (288)--except, of course, when he's lying.  The effect might have been better if there were more clues to the narrator's identity, although the reader soon figures out that he must be fairly high up on the novel's food chain.  For me, at least, the novel took too many potshots at too many contemporary genres; while mysteries, neo-Victorian fiction, Dan Brown, and apocalypto-fic are all ripe for an astute parodist's assault, that assault would make more of a boom! if it concentrated on one target.   By the end, The Somnambulist bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the Frankensteinish Chairman, who lurches about while his constituent parts tumble off or dissolve into slime.  Still, there's enough humor here to suggest that Barnes has a future as a comic novelist or satirist. 

Sunday Duckling Blogging

This is the third set of ducklings I've spotted, but the first close enough for me to photograph. 

A far, far better thing?

Irving E. Rockwood's "Scholarly Book Publishing: A Dickensian Perspective" offers, in A Tale of Two Cities mode, some prophecies for the future.  Rockwood's concerns lie with the publishing industry; what I'd like to do here is raise some of the questions an academic might have about his vision of the future.

1) Shift to electronic publishing/collapse of the university press system as it now stands:

a) I suspect that there's likely to be a long intermediate period before everything goes completely digital, in which we have a combination of eBook/POD/website/etc. formats. 

b) An entirely digital format would presumably eliminate the secondhand book market for scholarly monographs---unless publishers sell the virtual equivalent of a "material" monograph, one that can be transferred between readers, instead of what is effectively a software license.   Without the secondhand market, individual buyers may well be unable to afford monographs, especially if publishers like OUP or Cambridge try to maintain their current (astronomically expensive) price structure.  It's not clear how far academic publishers can reduce their prices and still remain in the black, even if they are no longer producing books in hardcopy.   

c) Publishers will also need to produce books in multiple proprietary formats and somehow ensure that buyers can "transfer" books from one reader/computer to another.  For free. If I spend $225 (ack!) on a book from Oxford, that book will be accessible whether I've got it on my shelf or on my nightstand.  But if I can't transfer my $225 book from Kindle to whatever, let alone from old machine to new machine,  I will...not be buying a $225 book. 
 

2) Libraries as publishers of the future:

a) If a university's press folds, it does not then follow that the university will cheerfully reallocate the funds to the library.  At many campuses, the trend has been to cut library funding.  Electronic publishing of whatever sort will require more $, not less.      (Especially since existing library staff ! = editorial staff.)

b) If libraries adopt an outwardly-directed publishing model, in which Library X publishes the work of scholars both inside and outside the university, this may not be a problem; if they adopt an inwardly-directed publishing model, in which Library X only publishes the work of affiliated scholars, then scholars at SLACS, regional comprehensives, community colleges, and so forth will find themselves short on publishing outlets (with nasty repercussions for their careers, among other things).

3) Press mergers:

a) As in the non-academic market, massive publishing conglomerates may impose even greater restrictions on book projects than already exist, thanks to homogenization, the possible elimination of editorial positions, etc.

4) Digitization & its financial discontents:

a) I'm wondering how a wholesale move to digital publishing will affect library purchasing.  Will libraries have to buy permanent use rights or subscriptions, and how much would that cost? (Electronic journal subscriptions, as we all know, tend to be priced well into the ether.)  Many libraries already have e-book libraries of some sort--netLibrary, for example--but could these e-books be synced with Kindle or other readers?

b) Again, faculty at SLACs, regional comprehensives, CCs, and even smaller research universities may well pause at the prospect of having to find enough cash to self-publish (and ensure that the book remains available).  Server space as part of one's start-up package? Subvention funds? Moreover, while more and more faculty will have the aptitude to produce at least a decent-looking electronic book, time is an entirely different issue.

c) There have been a number of online conversations about peer review in an electronic environment.   As Andrew Battista points out, "the fragile financial conditions that most university presses now endure inevitably affect the health and stability of academic departments," since, at research campuses and some smaller institutions, not publishing a book = not getting tenure.  A turn to self-published work would explode some of the average tenure committee's current criteria for determining a book's quality, including peer review (or, rather, the fact of same) and the publisher's prestige.

This Week's Acquisitions

(Despite the length of the list, nearly everything on it was either free, for review, or courtesy of an Amazon gift certificate [thanks, W. W. Norton!].) 

• Joseph Hocking, "Lest We Forget" (Ward & Lock, c. 1901).  One of the last Victorian historical novels about the Marian persecutions, this one from a Methodist POV.  Some background & a bibliography here.  (AbeBooks)
• Michael Pritchett, The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis (Unbridled, 2007).  Unhappy high school history teacher attempts to write a biography.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Geoff Ryman, Was (Penguin, 1993).  Triple plot: a dying man obsessed with The Wizard of Oz, the life of Judy Garland, and the "real" Dorothy Gale.  A reacquisition, really, as I got rid of a damaged copy a few years back.  (From a colleague)
• W. G. Sebald, Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (New Directions, 2000).  Meditations (in transit) on memory, featuring Sebald, Kafka, and Stendhal.  (From a colleague)
• ---, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New Directions, 1997).  Entwined biographies of four Jews in exile.  (From a colleague)
• ---, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New Directions, 1999).  Sebald treks across England.  (From a colleague)
• Bernhard Schlink, The Reader (Vintage, 1999).  An adolescent boy makes a horrifying discovery about the woman with whom he is obsessed.  (From a colleague)
• Graham Greene, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (Simon & Schuster, 1980).  Short satirical novel about a man who humiliates his greedy guests.  I have vague memories of the BBC adaptation.  (From a colleague)
• Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves: A Novel (Harper, 2008).  The decades-long aftermath of a 1911 murder and its repercussions for the local Indian community.  (BOMC)
• Kate Christensen, The Great Man (Anchor, 2008).  An artist's biographers reveal various unsavory truths.  (Lift Bridge)
• Diane E. Boyd, ed., Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth-century Women Transforming Public and Private (Delaware, 2008).  Essays on women's work, authorship, the gendered public sphere.  (To be reviewed for Choice)
• Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach, 2nd ed. (Wipf & Stock, 1999).  Revised edition of this controversial study.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Belknap, 2007).  Hermeneutics during the English Reformation.  (Amazon [secondhand])

The Manuscript Man

Time for another trip to the land of Victorian evangelical literature.  The Manuscript Man belongs to a subgenre of Protestant religious fiction devoted to evangelical/missionary work in Ireland.   Its author, the short-lived Elizabeth Hely Walshe, was herself a native of Ireland, and she set at least four of her novels there--this one being probably the least well-known. 

The Manuscript Man, as well as others of its type (see, e.g., Innisfail), clearly owes a debt to the Irish national tales of the early nineteenth century: in addition to its quasi-ethnographic representations  of the Irish peasantry, it manifests some awareness of nationalist political unrest and spends time on the aesthetics of the Irish landscape [1].  However, as I will suggest at the end of this post, Walshe's evangelical intentions lead her to rewrite the genre as practiced by the Banims, Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, and other Irish novelists of the period.

The novel begins with the return of a long-absent Irishman, Major Bryan, to the estate which he has inherited from his deceased brother.  Although the evangelical Bryan's arrival sets the plot in motion, he isn't the main character; that would be Donat Clare, the "Manuscript Man," one of the only literate peasants in the area.  Bryan introduces Clare to an Irish translation of the New Testament and asks him to teach the other locals how to read.  As Bryan intends, literacy quickly becomes tied to Protestant evangelization, much to the aggravation of the Nasty Young Priest, Father Devenish, and the moderate disquiet of the Nice Old Priest, Father Eusebius.  Father Devenish and his parishioners harass Clare and those of his students, like the fisherman Pat Colman, who refuse to disavow their Bible-reading; the harassment quickly escalates into property destruction, stone-throwing, curses, and beatings.  Meanwhile, matters are somewhat complicated by the reappearance of Clare's long-lost brother, Redmond, one of the Ribbonmen, who may or may not have been responsible for the murder of Bryan's father.  Depending on how you look at it, Bryan's success in spreading the Protestant Word is a trifle equivocal, since the novel's main converts all wind up decamping to the United States. 

Walshe deploys so many recognizable anti-Catholic topoi that a checklist will do:

• Characters respond immediately, instinctively and affectively to Bible reading (although some may resist)
• Priests manipulate women through the confessional
• Catholicism consists solely of mechanical ritual
• Ritual is presented as "self-evidently" ridiculous
• Catholic worship is idolatrous
• Catholic priests have no real interest in the Bible
• Catholicism promotes superstition

Not surprisingly, however, the novel shares some of its strategies with Catholic fiction:

• The believer in the "wrong" faith feels deeply unhappy (in anti-Catholic fiction, because the Church and its sacraments provide no help in times of crisis; in anti-Protestant fiction, because the various churches and the Bible provide no sense of authoritative truth)
• The logical outcome of the "wrong" faith is P. Z. Myers (in anti-Catholic fiction, because the more educated become skeptical first about Catholic ritual and authority, then about all ritual and authority; in anti-Protestant fiction, because private judgment undermines the Bible and all other sources of authority)
• In any controversial debate, the believer in the "right" faith almost always reduces his or her opponent to infuriated silence
• Conversion results in some degree of social stigma, up to and including physical and psychological brutality

 

The novel's attitude to Irish literacy and Bible-reading, however, turns out to be rather interesting, and it's here that it engages with its roots in the national tale.  Ina Ferris argues that, among other things, the national tale has "discomfort" as one of its constitutive elements (13), a discomfort that manifests itself in part in Gothic literary conversations about ruins.  Unlike the "shudder" (118) analyzed by Ferris, however, this novel's ruins provoke nothing but mild melancholy.  Indeed, when Major Bryan first meets Donat Clare, Clare asks him to arrange for the return of a looted Ogham stone (12).  Later, we hear that Clare's popularity derives from his ability to narrate "lore" from the "golden age of Irish history" (45, 47).   The illiterate peasant community unites itself around the twin pillars of Catholic ritual and Irish antiquarianism, both of which they experience as part of oral tradition--even though they are actually in the keeping of a literate elite. 

Walshe structures Clare's journey towards Protestantism, however, as a rejection of Irish antiquity in favor of Scriptural presence.  First, public Bible reading replaces Irish legends in Clare's repertoire, a substitution initially received by his audience as a purely literary pleasure (47).  Next, as one old woman perceives, the Bible becomes not just a source of enjoyment equivalent to the Irish legends, but a superior enjoyment, and one different in kind: "'T'is better than hearing about kings [...] for this King is living, up in the heavens,' and she raised her skinny finger.  'It's a history of power.  Go on, man'" (55).  In moving from king to King, the Manuscript Man displaces his purely national and potentially oppositional investment in the past (the lost kings of Ireland) with a universalized and, as it turns out, quietist investment in an eternal present (Christ in Heaven).  It is this new history that leads Clare's brother to confess his wrongdoing, and, in a moment of obvious symbolism, ultimately prompts Clare to sell his manuscripts in order to finance his trip to the United States.  If, as Katie Trumpener suggests, the national tale usually reveals that "[a] landscape assumed to be barren and backward reverberates with the sound of an ancient culture" (141), The Manuscript Man "reveals" that culture only to turn it into a mere curiosity.  Literacy doesn't just combat Catholicism; it combats nationalism.  To belong to Christ's kingdom means not necessarily belonging to any particular geographical space at all.    While the novel ends with Clare and his wife reading Irish aloud, it is "in the pages of the Irish Bible brought to the new home beyond the sea" (190)--a home chosen for its sympathy to Protestant worship, not for its deep-rooted antiquity.      

[1] For this genre, see Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge  University Press, 2002); Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 

Wish list

Adam Roberts has suggested that I vary my acquisitions lists with a wish list.  Like all bibliophiles, academics, and academic bibliophiles, I yearn to own any number of things.  I'll confine myself here to books that I would buy if I didn't actually need to eat. 

• Thomas Laqueur's Religion and Respectability (1977).  Before Laqueur started writing about sex and gender, he wrote about...Sunday schools.  I've been looking for a copy of this book since 1993 (and see that Amazon actually has a couple of relatively affordable copies available--both of which will no doubt vanish now that I've called attention to them). 
• Pickering & Chatto produces these lovely sets, all of them at prices so astronomical that I can't even justify ordering them for the campus library.  For example, English Catholicism 1680-1830, or  Varieties of Women's Sensation Fiction, or...
• The early modern/nineteenth c. volumes of the Cambridge History of Christianity would be awfully nice.
• I also have unfulfilled dreams of stumbling over an affordable copy of Josef Altholz's Anatomy of a Controversy: The Debate over "Essays and Reviews" 1860-1864 (1994).
• For some reason, I have yet to find