Boredom and weariness

Research frequently involves large, unpalatable doses of boredom, exhaustion, and sheer exasperation.  No matter how exciting the topic or how invested the scholar, there's no escaping long hours of pulling source after source out of the stacks, reading books that drive you to fantasize about taking extreme measures, and straining one's eyesight while studying tracts printed in four-point fonts.  Under such circumstances, blogs prove extremely useful--because, even though you inflicted those anti-Catholic poems from the Bulwark on yourself, you can at least lament your scholarly foolishness to an audience of (one hopes) reasonably sympathetic souls. 

Obviously, the boredom factor looms much larger when you're studying works that are not "good" according to even the loosest application of the most liberal aesthetic principles.   (At best, as is the case with Newman's Loss and Gain, they may be good things of their kind--in this case, Catholic conversion fiction.  Given the choice between Newman-as-novelist and, say, Thackeray, though, Newman loses.  Come to think of it, given the choice between Newman-as-novelist  and Margaret Oliphant or Mrs. Humphry Ward, Newman loses.)  In days of yore, by which I mean the 1980s and earlier, critics working on less-than-good fiction rarely tried to "rescue" it.  Here's James Cahalan on mid-19th c. Irish historical fiction: "If the foregoing sentence has conveyed by its deliberate long-windedness any of the sheer exhaustion of trying to read most of these novels, then it has succeeded in its other task, for it is true that many of them are, in Thomas Flanagan's phrase, best lost in 'a merciful oblivion.'"¹  Or Margaret Maison on Elizabeth Agnew:

However thickly coated with the jam of "romance", the pill of theology in this type of novel is usually too unwieldy to swallow.  Miss  Agnew liked to turn her heroes into priests and her heroines into nuns, but her propaganda for the religious life was far too feeble and unconvincing to combat the strong and scandalous tradition of "wicked Jesuit" and "nunnery-tale" books in England at that time.²

Having slogged my way through Geraldine, I can certainly sympathize with Maison's assessment of Agnew's gifts (or "gifts," rather).

From a literary-historical POV, though, such virtuoso displays of sheer ennui can get in the way of thinking about the novels and their actual significance (if any).  While many of the novels Cahalan listed in his long, long sentence have vanished into the ether--if only to be resurrected on GoogleBooks--and Agnew's publications after Geraldine were not a huge success (to put it mildly), Geraldine itself sold quite well in the UK and the USA, was translated into French and German, and remained in print from the 1830s until the end of the nineteenth century.  Not as big of a success as Loss and Gain,  by any means, but Geraldine is right up there--which means that literary historians dismiss it at their peril, even if everyone else is free to ignore it. 

And yet, I've discovered that even tedious novels sometimes "animate" when you start working through their narrative strategies, theological principles, and the like.  It is, after all, possible to undo one's boredom by situating the novel in its own historical "story."   In a sense, the novels take on new life when they become characters in a scholarly plot...

[1] James M. Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1983), 68.
[2] Margaret Maison, The Victorian Vision: Studies in the Religious Novel (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961), 149. 

Comments

[FingerPaint]

Forgive me for asking because I truly mean this as an honest question and not sarcasm. In my field (Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Narrative) we often have to ask ourselves the question: what will a proposed article or research add to the community and total body of knowledge. Every time we need to evaluate this and if there is no good answer we don't get through the peer review process.

Can I ask what an article in your field adds to the body of knowledge already in existence?

[Steve Fellner]

If you're really bored, read my blog! Why am I not on your blogroll as it is? My blog is intellectual. Just like a real scholar.

http://pansypoetics.blogspot.com/

I'm not just inviting you. But all Victorians. Victorians are people too. That's my philosophy.

[Miriam]

Steve, you are on my blogroll, sandwiched between "Novel Readings" and "Pepys' Diary."

[Miriam]

Given that Victorian studies is an umbrella term for any discipline studying the Victorians, "my field" is not the best way to ask the question. I can only talk about what "unknowns" my work addresses:

At the most basic level, I'm writing about once-popular authors whose work was frequently imitated by others, but who are now nevertheless unread. Not to mention Catholic novelists, about whose work most scholars know very little. The knowledge, it has many, many gaps.

Genre history: for example, demonstrating that "the Victorian historical novel" encompassed a wide range of texts ruled out of court by critics after Lukacs, and showing how an awareness of such texts affects our readings of the canonical tradition.

Religious history: in the case of my current project, analyzing how Victorian invocations of "the Reformation" played out in religious fiction and controversy (it played out in a lot of other places, too, like politics, debates over public monuments, quarrels about founding new colleges, and the like). Not something that has been studied in any extensive depth yet when it comes to literature.

The history of what D. R. Woolf calls "historical thinking": how frequently abstruse historical subjects were popularized and disseminated to the non-specialist audience through genres other than history.

Practical applications: The obscure literary texts I study not only provide much of the foundation for modern pop Christian fiction (of which there is...a lot) but have themselves resurfaced as recommended reading for homeschoolers, thanks to the explosion of digitized texts and cheap POD solutions. IOW, these novels haven't actually disappeared, despite their status as "ephemera"...something most academics certainly don't know, I've discovered. (Modern religious novelists seem to fly completely under the mainstream critical radar, anyway, with some very rare exceptions--Marilynne Robinson, for example. Not that I'm claiming to be an expert on post-19th c. religious fiction, just making an observation.)

[Jennifer]

This is a great place to be right now--I think in our current media revolution cannonicity is being reconstructed in multiple terrains and it opens up wide fields of study that are yet uncharted. You are dead on about POD and electronic texts changing the game for previously uncharted novels.

I am applauding you--like Simon Cowell giving an officious standing ovation. ;)

[Bourgeois Nerd]

You know, putting novels into a larger story sounds like a really good idea for a high-concept novel. Jasper Fforde (and others, I'm sure) has done it with CHARACTERS from different novels, but the novels themselves as characters? Has anyone ever done that?

[FingerPaint]

It sounds like The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift might qualify.