The Little Professor

Brief note: The Devil's Larder

Jim Crace's The Devil's Larder (2001) consists of sixty-four tales involving food.  The tales are numbered, almost all short-shorts (in fact, the final entry is two words long), and mostly plotless.  Initial appearances to the contrary, the stories are not set in "our" reality: invented philosophers to one side, the food is frequently imaginary, as are some of the methods for collecting and even eating it, and there are vague references to historical events that fit no known timeline.  Crace thus asks the reader to "dine" at an imaginary table, in which oddly-familiar tales (#5, about childhood disillusionment, references pomegranates and a crab apple tree) co-exist with scatological revenge fantasies (#55, which may put readers off mussels forever) and pure fantasy (#41, which, like #55, may belong on Waiterrant).  The tales are particularly intrigued by food's ability to transform and be transformed--food as a process, so to speak--and repeatedly link eating to sex, death, and defecation.  Ultimately, Crace links the process of eating, excreting, living, and dying to all creative acts of imagination; if food fuels his characters' minds and bodies, it also provides the object on which their minds and bodies work.  Literal acts become figurative and vice-versa, as when a grieving widow eats her husband's ashes, only to be warned by a doctor that "[y]ou can't eat grief.  It's far too strong and indigestible.  You have to let the grief eat you.  You have to let the sorrow swallow you" (163). 

Crace usually resists the more comforting, positive connotations of eating.  Sharing food often doesn't produce community, and the collection is noticeably short on communion imagery.   Tales #23-25, for example, all link eating with alienation or estrangement: a boy's betrayal of an eccentric neighbor by refusing to eat his gifts of food, a mother's growing frustration with her children, an old "friend" sardonically dissecting an apparently repetitive lunch date.  Similarly, the cook's practical jokes in #55 unite the local community, to be sure, but do so in what borders on xenophobic fashion.  The isolation and awkwardness that permeates these tales carries over into their attitude to imagination, which feeds as much on a kind of starvation (#1, an unidentifiable can of food) as it does on its immediate object.  This is not a new observation about imagination--after all, literature groans under the weight of characters who discover that a fantasy come true is rarely fulfilling--but it does contribute to the collection's overall tone of dissatisfaction.  Much of the food turns out to be like champagne, "rarely equal to its task or to its reputation" (116).

The reader expecting that Crace will wrap up the collection tightly (as if in Saran Wrap) will no doubt be baffled by #64 (165):

Oh honey

Yes, that's the tale in its entirety.  In a sense, it's "raw," and needs to be "cooked."  There's an obvious pun (honey as term of endearment/honey as food).  But, stripped of its context, this exclamation? ejaculation? note of exasperation? provokes the reader into supplying tone, at the very least.  It's a pointedly subjective moment, granted added emphasis by what isn't there: the punctuation mark, without which we have neither an end nor any clue how to read the words on the page.   But as in the other tales, there's no guarantee that what the reader cooks up will create an interpretive community with either the author or anyone else.   

This Week's Acquisitions

• Nina Revoyr, The Age of Dreaming (Akashic, 2008).  In L.A., Japanese silent-film star faces past. (Amazon [secondhand])
• John Angell James, The Anxious Inquirer after Salvation (American Tract Society, n.d.).  Classic work on discovering the path to salvation by the popular Congregationalist minister (1785-1859).  The Internet Archive has a copy.  (Gift from colleague)
• John Walker, The Sufferings of the Clergy During the Great Rebellion (John Henry and James Parker, 1862).  Victorian "epitome" (xii) of an eighteenth-century text devoted to asserting the claims of Church of England clergy against the accusations of those ejected by the Act of Uniformity.  (The Parkers usually published books with distinctly High Church sympathies.)  Probably abridged by William Edward Flaherty.   (eBay)

Research: Ten Major Frustrations

1. You: Country X.  Only extant copy of book you need to read: Country Y.
2. Library possesses all issues of Standard Victorian Periodical, except for the one you need to consult.
3. Library has discarded all issues of Standard Victorian Periodical because "it's digitized now."
4. Standard Victorian Periodical's paper and leather binding both crumble into dust during photocopying process. 
5. Entire print run of Weird Victorian Novel was apparently repurposed in order to wrap Mrs. Lovett's meat pies.
6. Offsite storage.
7. Book snake proves totally useless.   
8. Growing popularity of mobile aisle shelving = increasing likelihood of being accidentally crushed to death in the stacks. 
9. Triple-decker novel converted into double-columned, single-volume text printed in eight-point font. 
10. Because Eminent Professor X feels overdue fines and recall notices are beneath him, important scholarly text will next be available when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse trot on by. 

Putting on the ritz

Shelves, original version (bullnoses only on the fixed shelves):

Shelves, new! improved! version:

Detailed view (note additional reinforcement at the back):

Well, that's inconvenient

There's some work going on involving the shelves (or Shelves), so I'm stacking books, yet again:

In case you're wondering, that's three stacks of Emily Sarah Holt at the lower left.

Alas, I think I need a book that's in here, somewhere:

Sabbaticalizing

1) It's rather unnerving to arrive in the department just as one of the workmen absconds with your desk.  (The new desk arrives tomorrow.)

2) My mailbox has returned, albeit out of alphabetical order. 

3) Most common question so far: "You're on sabbatical! What are you doing here?"  (This is what happens when you live within walking distance of campus; since I'm one of those people who likes to perambulate while thinking, I'm often trotting around the village anyway.) 

4) As for what I'm actually supposed to be doing: I'm finishing up the martyrdom chapter I drafted over the summer.  (By which I mean that the chapter was about martyrdom; the chapter didn't martyr me.  Not yet, anyway.  It may have plans.)  Part of it mutated into an article, currently out and about in the world, and I'm now in the somewhat mind-numbing position of integrating revisions made to the article back into the original chapter.  Meanwhile, I'm doing the final reading for the next chapter (which will probably be the previous chapter, but you can't have everything) and assembling my notes. Onward! I'm planning on five chapters for this book; the goal for this semester is to draft chapters two and four.  I'm most nervous about chapter five, for reasons I'll explain once I get to it in the spring. 

I think I'll be posting weekly summaries of what I manage to accomplish, the better to keep myself motivated.   

When narratives attack

Timothy Larsen's Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (OUP, 2006), which discusses the reconversion experiences of working-class Victorian secularists, argues against the well-known "crisis of faith" narrative in Victorian studies.  Larsen complains that--if one asks Victorian intellectual historians, anyway--"[t]here might have been hordes of earnest Christians running around trying to keep people from enjoying themselves, but thinking Victorians, at any rate, generally abandoned orthodox faith--or so the impression is left" (2).  As is so often the case, however, English professors bear much of the blame for this "distortion":

The theme of a crisis of faith can loom as large in their own field as people in that discipline wish it to or decide that it should: no corrective is being offered here to another discipline.  What is being observed, however, is that a distinction needs to be clearly made between a theme in literature or English studies and a judgement regarding what a historical period itself was actually like.  And the crisis of faith does loom very large indeed in English studies.  (5)

Larsen's evidence for this looming consists of a no-longer accessible syllabus for UIUC's ENG 210, which (if the name in the URL Is any indication) was being taught by one of UIUC's Romanticists; the Victorian volume of the Oxford English Literary History (2002); the late Richard D. Altick's Victorian People and Ideas (1973); Basil Willey's two Nineteenth-Century Studies volumes (1950 and 1956); A. O. J. Cockshut's The Unbelievers (1964); and an anecdote from Joss Marsh (1998).  For some reason, the list then segues briefly into ecclesiastical and intellectual historians (Anthony Symonds, Owen Chadwick, Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman, Gerald Parsons, A. N. Wilson [no offense, but...not the same type of historian, surely?]), before returning to English with "Robert Wolff's Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (1977), Elisabeth Jay's Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain (1986), and R. L. Brett's Faith and Doubt: Religion and Secularization in Literature from Wordsworth to Larkin (1997)" (9). 

I'm not going to disagree at all with Larsen's larger claim that the "crisis of faith" ought to be having its own crisis right about now, but it's not altogether clear to me that Larsen quite succeeds in assigning blame to the average English professor.  To begin with, his final three choices are a little strange.  Jay's book is an anthology with the usual contextual introductions and Wolff's is a massive editor's preface to Garland's (handy) "Novels of Faith and Doubt" series; neither one counts as "literary studies" (9) in the sense that Larsen intends.  And Brett's argument, as far as I can tell, is somewhat different than the title suggests (e.g., he isn't opposing religion to secularisation [31-32]).   More seriously, however, Larsen stacks the deck by his choice of texts.  Counting the syllabus, only three of the ten appeared within the past decade (and Larsen adduces Marsh's book for its anecdote, not its subject matter).  And they're all wide-ranging surveys.    Surveys are useful when you're trying to identify general trends, because they often rely heavily on received wisdom.  In fact, surveys of whatever type tend to be intellectually conservative, intentionally or otherwise, if only because the writer (or instructor) has to cover a lot of space in a little time.  But for that very reason, surveys often suffer from "lag time" in terms of their relationship to what's going on elsewhere in the field: in monographs, articles, dissertations, and so forth.  It would also be nice to know why these surveys and not, say, the Victorian volume of Hoxie Neal Fairchild's Religious Trends in English Poetry (1957), which, if lit crit is at issue, would seem more relevant than Cockshut's book.  (Or, for that matter, J. Hillis Miller's The Disappearance of God.) 

It's possible, I think, to construct an entirely different narrative about Victorian literary studies, in which faith exists at the center, with doubt coming into play but not at the core of things.  One could start with Joseph Ellis Baker's The Novel and the Oxford Movement (1932), Andrew Landale Drummond's The Churches in English Fiction (1950), and Margaret Maison's Search Your Soul, Eustace (1961).  Then, moving to the 1970s, Valentine Cunningham's Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (1975) and Elisabeth Jay's The Religion of the Heart (1979).  More recently still, Thomas Vargish's The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction (1985).    And then, the positive explosion of interest in the past decade or so, ranging from monographs on single authors or families thereof (e.g., Diane D'Amico's Christina Rossetti [1999], Marianne Thormahlen's The Brontes and Religion [1999],  Lynda Palazzo's Christina Rossetti's Feminist Theology [2002]) to more general studies (e.g., Michael Wheeler's Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology [1990], Christine L. Krueger's The Reader's Repentance [1992], Royal W. Rhodes' The Lion and the Cross [1995], Cynthia Scheinberg's Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England [2002], Susan M. Griffin's Anti-Catholicism and English Fiction [2004]). 

In fact, though, that second narrative exists in tension with Larsen's "crisis of faith" narrative.  Or, to put it differently, there has always been doubt about the crisis of faith.   When I was dissertating, one of my readers gently pointed out that I was attacking a trend that, while nevertheless real, was neither a) the trend or b) a trend spanning all time and space.  One of the problems with hacking through the scholarly undergrowth is that there's just so much of it; now that we're in the age of electronic databases, our search terms limit what we find in all sorts of unexpected and inadvertent ways.   Things get even more complicated when the undergrowth in question does not belong to your own disciplinary backyard (Larsen is in theology, not English).  I continue to feel ongoing angst about accurately situating my own project, which keeps tumbling over into territory I don't normally occupy.   

It would be interesting to think about the faith/crisis of faith narrative dynamic in terms of the research imperative: do something that hasn't been done before (Marsh's anecdote is about precisely that, as it happens).  Fill the gap, as they say.  And, as I said above, there's the conservatism of surveys and encyclopedias, which frequently err on the side of what everyone agrees on instead of what everyone debates.  I wouldn't be surprised if the next decade sees the slow erosion of the survey-level crisis of faith, especially given the appearance of classroom-oriented books like Mark Knight's and Emma Mason's Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• [George E. Sargent], The Story of a Pocket Bible (RTS, n.d.).  An object narrative: the novel's narrator is, indeed, a bible.  (I also own an abridged American edition.)  For Sargent's career, see here.  (eBay)
• [William Combe], Doctor Syntax (Frederick Warne, n.d.).  Omnibus edition of the three Tours in Search of...--the Picturesque, a Wife, and Consolation--which began as a parody of William Gilpin.  The poems were commissioned by Thomas Rowlandson to accompany his engravings, some of which you can see at the Royal Academy of Arts.  (Gift from colleague)
• Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant (NYRB, 2001).  Reprint of Compton-Burnett's social satire, featuring an absolutely horrible paterfamilias.  (eBay)
• David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media  in America (OUP, 2004).  Studies the role of religious publishers in shaping American book-buying and reading practices.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Episcopal Magazine and Church of England Warder, vol. I (four issues, 1839).  Despite the title, this was actually a Scottish Episcopal periodical, initially published as Stephen's Edinburgh Ecclesiastical Journal.  First four issues from 1839 only; bound in with the next entry.  (eBay)
• The Scottish Magazine and Churchman's Review (var., 1849-53).  Seven issues of another Scottish Episcopal periodical; you can see the first volume here. (eBay)

Because one exclamation point is never enough

It's hard to resist a novel with this title. 

A new school year begins, so the Laws of Academic Calories must be in play

If there are leftover fudge brownies from freshman comp orientation, they contain no calories.

[N.B.: There remain questions about whether or not the Laws of Academic Calories remain in force when the academic doing the eating is on sabbatical; see, e.g., M. E. Burstein, "Chocolate Magnetism and the Academic Body: Deconstructing the Traditional Physio-Chemical Analysis," Studies in Academic Absurdity 1.1 (2008): 32-152.]