The Little Professor

The Summer of the Royal Visit

Reading Isabel Colegate's The Summer of the Royal Visit (1992) put me in mind of Suzanne Keen's Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction, in which Keen argues that such romances narrate "the recovery of discovery of 'the truth,' a quasi-historical truth that makes sense of confusion, resolves mystery, permits satisfying closure, and, most importantly, can be located."¹  On the surface, at least, Colegate's short neo-Victorian novel fits Keen's model: the rather self-abasing narrator (the very first lines: "Let us just think for a moment then who I am.  No one much" [3]) is a widowed former history teacher turned researcher in the local archives, who alternates between "peering at card indexes and trying to read old copies of the local newspaper on scratched microfilm" (4) and wandering through the city and its environs.  Using this fictionalized spa town as the core of the tale, the narrator spins a multiplot account of the various do-gooders, architects, clergymen, and con(wo)men converging on this city in the late nineteenth century.  Besides the space, two events unite these very disparate characters: the competition to build a new hotel and a very brief visit by Queen Victoria.   In turn, the city's ever-mutable space links the narrator to his characters, along with his genetic relationship to one of his major players, his grandmother Charlotte Moore.  Although the narrator has textual authority for significant passages of his tale--the aforementioned newspapers, but, more importantly, the diary of unhappy local clergyman Stephen Collingwood--it is not, in fact, altogether clear that what he wants or offers is "the truth," and he constructs his story so as to rule out much in the way of "closure" (let alone of the "satisfying" variety).

The narrative works mostly by association, frequently seguing from one character's POV to another's as a given encounter ends; in effect, the plot proceeds by chain links.  This associativeness works in the narrator's present as well, as the tale either emerges from his movement from place to place or, conversely, sparks a moment of reflection.  Because the narrator does not remain submerged, as it were, but frequently resurfaces--at first keeping his voice out of the Victorian sequences, then eventually entering into them to offer more direct commentary--the reader never loses sight of just how much he needs to fill in his documentary gaps.  Paradoxically, his access to nearly everyone's POV highlights the fictiveness, rather than the historicity, of a good chunk of his project.²  As he explains near the end, "I found I could be a better historian if I allowed myself, just for myself, to tell stories" (215).  In a sense, we overhear (to use John Stuart Mill's turn of phrase) the novel: it becomes the narrator's private riff on the publically available documents.  To put it differently, Colegate crafts the illusion that the novel has no designs on the reader.  Our narrator's self-deprecation, his interest in history as primarily a source of personal pleasure ("the springs of joy" [200]), suggests that his passions are purely antiquarian--one of Walter Scott's frame narrators meandering about in the twentieth century. 

However, the actual plot rubs harshly against this vision of storytelling as good, clean escapist fun.  Although the overall tone is quietly ironic, the vaguely Cranford-esque atmosphere³ contains within itself a much darker antiquarianism, embodied by the mysterious fixer Caspar Freeling and his interest in the Druids.   (Which is not to say that the narrator's passion for the past lacks its own problematic quality: it's hard not to suspect that he has more passion for the past than for his late wife, whom he rarely mentions and always in a tone of mild bemusement.)  Caspar's cod-Druidism--as Collingwood perceptively notes, "'[h]e would have to invent it'" (23)--seems at first entirely Dryasdustish, what with his convictions that the local Circus had been deliberately built "on the site of a former Druid circle" (36).  But then, an article about Druids crops up, rather incongruously, as part of wealthy Marianne Hanbury's masochistic request for sex with Freeling (53).  This moment, which seems to class Freeling's Druid obsession under the "quietly ironic" rubric, turns out to foreshadow something much uglier: this apparently mutual play with class differences and sexuality recurs in the actual point of Freeling's Druid reenactments, which is to prostitute working-class children to upper-class men.  One of Freeling's customers, political reformer Herbert Tranmer, moans to Collingwood that "'[i]t was the meetings, the ritual, the dressing up, it made it all seem unreal, that's to say possible, the impossible was possible'" (179).   Antiquarian costume drama turns out to conceal one of the worst forms of human exploitation.  (One thinks of Charles Stross on steampunk.)  The pleasures of neo-Victorian fantasies may not, after all, be quite so innocent.   Intriguingly, Freeling's self-exculpatory vision of his own self-making, "a series of superimposed and more or less merging histories, each created to meet the needs of the moment, each convincing because he himself believed in it" (186)--stories that may be more "fiction" than "history" (186)--anticipates the narrator's own pleasure in storytelling.  The primary difference, it seems, is that Freeling (again to borrow from Mill) intends his stories to be heard, not overheard. 

Despite Stephen Collingwood's unpleasant discussion with Herbert Tranmer, the narrator in his own voice betrays no particular moral investment in the outcome: nothing happens to Freeling, who tries to burn his boy and girl prostitutes to death, or to any of the men involved in his ring (although Tranmer feels guilt, at least for a time), whereas Stephen Collingwood dies trying to rescue Freeling's exploited children.  There's no poetic justice involved; in fact, some characters disappear entirely from the narrative frame, like Marianne Hanbury, about whose afterlife the narrator can discover nothing.  It's as though once they've exited this regional space, both they and their actions simply cease to matter very much.   At most, such behavior excites the same kind of mild irony from the narrator as the racism of several locals when faced with the Indian wife of Collingwood's landlord.  The coziness with which the novel ends--the narrator's grandmother, who did not run away with Collingwood, quietly going home with her children--suggests that in the end, the past boils down comfortably to this humble, inconsequential domesticity.  Or is this fantasy of a resuscitated marriage (semi-aware husband and guilty wife, making up) the alternative to the narrator's own marriage, which seems to have been primarily characterized by miscommunication or noncommunication? Is this past, whether heard or overheard, really all that disinterested? 

¹ Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001), 14. 

²  I'm a little more skeptical about the narrator's claims to "credibility" than is Tatjana Jukic: "From Worlds to Words and the Other Way Around: The Victorian Inheritance in the Postmodern British Novel," Theme Parks, Rainforests, and Sprouting Wastelands: European Essays on Theory and Performance in Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Richard Todd and Louisa Flora (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 84n7.

³ It may not be an accident that Cranford is one of the few Victorian works to get name-checked. 

In which I analyze my allergy to Sherlock

Many years ago, I came across a quotation from the pianist Charles Rosen, in which he said something to the effect that if everyone else loved something that bored him, he concluded that the fault lay with himself and not with the something.  I am attempting to put that philosophy into play with Sherlock.  Because...it took me two days to get through the season finale, which I found badly plotted, implausible, and, in general, deeply uninteresting and uninvolving.  (At least it was not as badly plotted as The Hounds of Baskerville, which took A. C. Doyle's one outstanding Sherlock Holmes novel, put it through a mandolin, and then drowned it in a Thousand Island dressing of conspiracy theories.)  But everyone else (well, except for Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt) loves Sherlock; ergo, it must be me.  So. 

Perhaps we can start with things I don't find objectionable:

The acting.  Cumberbatch and Freeman are doing excellent work with what they're given.  They have strong chemistry, fine dramatic chops, and solid comic timing; moreover, they tend to leave the scenery relatively unchewed (which cannot be said for Jeremy Brett's later episodes, unfortunately).  

Neo-Watson and revisionist Lestrade.  Martin Freeman's Watson is very much in the post-Burke and Hardwicke (er, that's not to be confused with Burke and Hare) mode, which is to say that he's in possession of little gray cells and reasonably willing to give Holmes what for.  In other words, this is a further nail in the coffin of the Nigel Bruce Watson, which is all to the good.  I'd have to say that the series' Lestrade (at least what we see of him) is one of its more interesting features: it's unusual to have a Lestrade around who is not a) primarily there to look useless, b) sneaking around looking like a small and unpleasant rodent, and c) obnoxious comic relief.   (Doyle's Lestrade eventually warmed up to Holmes and Watson, but this one seems to have arrived there much sooner--at least, he's already on a first-name basis with Watson.)

The meta.  I've said more than once that this series foregrounds its status as an adaptation, as it is loaded with nods not just to the canon, but to fan expectations developed from other adaptations.  It's practically the grand sum of all pre-existing adaptations, remixed with healthy doses of contemporary TV detective conventions and CSI-style editing.  (As Lestrade so kindly pointed out to us in the finale.)  In some ways, the series has also been parodying both tabloid celebrity culture and some of the less appealing aspects of fan culture (of the sort liable to wind up on Fandom Wank).  I'm an English professor, so I'm programmed to have no objections to all things meta.

However.

I think it's perhaps here that's also the rub for me.  As I said in my review of A Scandal in Belgravia, this series is far less original than it seems to think it is.  Take, for example, the plot of the series finale:  Moriarty appears to be quite familiar with the late Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, and possibly Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Percent Solution as well.  Reflections on Holmes and Watson as a romantic couple, or at least a bromantic one, have been floating around for decades--see Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.  (On the professional publishing side, St. Martin's has published at least one novel with a [repressed] gay Watson, and of course there's a lifetime supply of Holmes/Watson fanfiction.)  Holmes as full-blown jerk, as opposed to bohemian gentleman, owes quite a bit to House. Irene Adler has been developing grand passions for Holmes since goodness knows when.  (I'm quite fond of Holmes and Adler as the proud mama and papa of Nero Wolfe, myself.)  And, of course, Moriarty as invasive killer weed is inescapable--doesn't everything have to go back to Moriarty?    Etc.  After decades upon decades of Sherlock Holmes parodies, pastiches, and revisions, it's not shocking that the series keeps retreading old ground.  It's just that it's not necessarily very interesting, either.  For lack of a better way of putting it, while the series likes to wink at itself and the Sherlock Holmes mythos, it doesn't want to do anything too harsh or too outlandish to it. (We get The Last Sherlock Holmes Story without its major twist.)  It doesn't probe the limits or moral implications of the legend (Michael Chabon, Mitch Cullin), or offer anything go-for-broke outrageous (Neil Gaiman), let alone real parodic play (Kim Newman).

Moreover, Lestrade's joke about CSI reminded me that Sherlock seems to be borrowing some of that series' least entertaining and/or remotely believable plots.  It's a criminal mastermind obsessed with the series lead! Who constructs weirdly overwrought schemes!  And then engages in "deep" mind games with the object of his affections (so to speak)! Which he finishes off with the sort of long speech that is supposed to sound profound, but which makes the audience wonder why the detective/CSI doesn't just shoot him/throw him off the roof/cold-cock him/forcefeed him hot peppers and be done with it! Of course Moriarty is Holmes' criminal double; we've known this since "The Final Problem."  But surely there are better, more economical ways of putting this doubling into action? (I once again nudge the reader in Dibdin's direction.  Or even Newman's.  We could even go back to Doyle, while we're at it.) 

To me, then, there's just too much deja vu involved (or, perhaps, deja lu).    I feel like I ought to be enjoying this series much more than I am.  But, so far, I'm not. 

 

 

 

 

 

Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

Wesley Stace's third novel, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, is simultaneously a kunstlerroman, a historical novel, and a novel about both biographical interpretation and the writing of biography.  Its genealogy ranges from Nabokov's Pale Fire (which Stace has acknowledged is an important influence) and James' The Aspern Papers to more recent efforts like Susan Schomberg Schaeffer's Poison, Gilbert Adair's Love and Death on Long Island,  and Kate Christensen's The Great Man. (Adair's enthusiasm for this novel is rather muted.)  The novel begins at what initially seems to be the end: a newspaper report announcing the murder-suicide of composer Charles Jerrold; his wife, singer Victoria London; and his wife's lover, Edward Manville.   In its conclusion, the report quotes music critic Leslie Shepherd, who "blamed Jessold's alcoholism and obsessive nature, declaring the murders an unnecessary tragedy, one that would inevitably tarnish the composer's legacy" (2).  Shepherd's last words, needless to say, deliberately oversimplify what turns out to be a far more complex situation, even as they also prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In what follows, Shepherd seeks to untangle Jessold's increasingly elusive character, the relationship of his music to early twentieth-century history, and his own role in Jessold's construction--and destruction.

The novel actually consists of two narratives: the lengthy memoir (it's half the book) that Shepherd draws up for the detectives investigating the murders, and Shepherd's corrective account, written after his wife's death (and prior to what the novel implies will be his own suicide).  Both narratives are preoccupied with the problem of an authentically "national" English music, with the Big Bad in both cases being Germany and its composers.  This quest for one true Englishness foreshadows the novel's other problems--to what extent can the arts (especially the musical arts) be interpreted as an expression of national identity, let alone personal problems? Contrariwise, to what extent do the arts emerge from only one muse, as it were? Shepherd initially bonds with Jessold over bouts of English folk-song collecting, which Shepherd invests with a racialized, post-Romantic aura of authenticity: "'Folk-songs have a biological appeal.  We must shake off the dead hand of foreign influence'" (44).    Shepherd, who does "not care for the pastoral itself" (25), is appropriately but ironically named: he fetishizes the oral culture of the countryside, which he captures, prints, and disseminates for more elite audiences, but England's rural spaces have little effect on him.  Despite his attempt to literally naturalize folk-song ("biological appeal") as part and parcel of a pure English nationhood, he has no Wordsworthian affinity for nature.  Moreover, his fantasy of English purity runs athwart of Jessold's skepticism, which discounts the need for a narrow, bordered nationalism--"'we are an Empire'," leaving aside the question of "'Great Britain'" (45)--and dismisses overtly nationalist arts as, effectively, kitschy cliches (45).  Jessold's arguments owe something to the "True-Born Englishman" tradition, which insists on the country's cultural and ethnic heterogeneity; to be purely English is a contradiction in terms.  Even Shepherd has to uneasily concede this problem: Handel and Mendelssohn, after all, can both be classed as an "honorary Englishman" (205), while, nearer home, his patron Lord Walmsley is an Anglicized (and Anglicanized) Lithuanian Jew, whose daughter (and Shepherd's wife) Miriam seems entirely English.  Jessold's own supposed "English" masterpiece, the opera Little Musgrave, is sparked by an English folk-song and by a story about the (real) double murder committed by Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo and by his exposure to German experiments in atonality and, at least in some measure, by his own personal life.  Cultural, personal, and national boundaries signally fail to converge.

In chasing after pure Englishness, then, Shepherd fails to pay attention to the permeability of artistic borders.   But he also unwittingly engages in the same kind of reductivism that characterizes the sensationalist writing of his (sort-of) rival Banter, whose biography of Jessold relentlessly reads the composer's work "through the lens of the murders, and through that lens only" (244). Inconveniently for Shepherd, Banter was inspired by his own postmortem dissection of Jessold, which narrated "a chain of events that led directly from that evening at Hatton [when Shepherd told Jessold Gesualdo's story] to the murders" (219).  (The Gesualdo story lands us in Pale Fire territory, as Kinbote claims to have done something similar to spark Shade's poem.)  As little as Shepherd wants to admit it, both approaches define the plot of Jessold's life in terms of a single event: Banter retroactively diagnoses every composition as an expression of an essential personality flaw that ultimately manifests in the killings, whereas Shepherd begins from the end (much like the novel) and then seeks to reconstruct the narrative that produced it.  Significantly, Shepherd's account centers himself--the turning point in Jessold's career, that is, is Shepherd's dramatic retelling of the Gesualdo murders (which, he fails to acknowledge, shares Banter's sensationalistic impulses).  Both accounts assume that Jessold can, in fact, be explained; they are, for all intents and purposes, intended to reduce Jessold to some easily-digested soundbite, no longer enigmatic.  The problem, as the reader no doubt expects, is that both authors only partially understand the man in question.  Banter has almost no access to Jessold's private papers and letters; Shepherd doesn't know all the ins and outs of the actual composition of Little Musgrave (and much remains mysterious, even after he is somewhat enlightened).  For that matter, the reader only partially understands the man in question. Not only does Shepherd withhold some extremely important information in the police memoir, but also it's impossible to locate the "real" Jessold in Shepherd's often self-serving tale. 

In his afterword, Stace acknowledges that his novel addresses some of "the pitfalls of biographical criticism" (386), although he doesn't stipulate which ones he has in mind.  Jessold, who will be done in by biographical criticism, instinctively understands its appeal, as the figure of "war poet" Josh Cradleless suggests.  (The novel's website, appropriately enough, represents the fictional Jessold as a real composer.)  One way of thinking about how biographical criticism, historicism, and "national character" (to use that once-popular phrase) play out in Charles Jessold are as forms of violence, both figurative and literal.  The sound-bitism I described in my previous paragraph uses explanation to first contain, then displace the disruptive Jessold from polite English narratives of music history.  The moment that Charles Jessold becomes "the murderer," he becomes essentially inaudible as a composer; Banter's true-crime narrative, for example, overwrites Jessold's compositions with the sounds of gunfire.  Jessold's music, Shepherd complains, became "completely unrevivable" (247).   Similarly, Shepherd's own obsession with the Englishness of English music turns out to be inseparable from Lord Walmsley's wartime propaganda.   Both Banter and Jessold try to "pin" their subject, rather like a butterfly.  There's a rather Wordsworthian "murder to dissect" vibe going on in the way in which both authors try to decompose Jessold and/or music in general.  

Of course, there's the mystery of the murder itself, which leads me to some major spoilers (although I imagine that most of Charles Jessold's readers will figure out at least some of what's what relatively early on).  Head below the fold.

Bring up the Bodies

If Anne Boleyn appears on the scene, the reader frequently wants to know: does the novelist find her guilty, or innocent? Victim, plotter, or some combination of the two? In Hilary Mantel's sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies, these questions prove entirely irrelevant.  We have no access to Anne except through Cromwell's POV, and Cromwell's primary motivations in this novel are serving his king, who wants Anne gone, and serving his own need for vengeance against those men who mocked his beloved former employer, Cardinal Wolsey. "'All the players gone,'" one character remarks, neatly summing up the plot's outcome, "'All four who carried the cardinal to Hell; and also the poor fool Mark who made a ballad of their exploits'" (400).    Readers familiar with the scholarship on Anne will recognize traces of it quietly surfacing and subsiding--Retha Warnicke's suggestion that Anne might have been persecuted as a witch, for example, which appears as one of the manifold reasons for bringing down the queen.  But Mantel's Anne remains tantalizingly out of reach.  The Constable of the Tower, William Kingston, is puzzled by her willingness to receive the Eucharist, for "surely she would not do [...] if she were guilty?" (392); Cromwell, meanwhile, keeps seeing things like "knives" when he looks at her (38).  This opacity about Anne's beliefs, motives, and ultimately acts never comes clear.  We are not even allowed to hear Anne's self-defense, in which she demonstrated that some of the charges against her were chronologically impossible.  In the end, though, Anne herself does not matter.  Cromwell's ability to weave an airtight fiction about her does. 

In that sense, this novel--leaner and tauter than Wolf Hall, but also talkier, now that Cromwell is no longer young--is far more openly self-aware about itself as a historical novel than its predecessor.  Relatively early on, Henry VIII tells Cromwell, with considerable self-satisfaction, "'I can do as it pleases me [...] God would not allow my pleasure to be contrary to his design, nor my designs to be impeded by his will'" (58).  Bring up the Bodies juxtaposes the monarch's fantasy of perfect free agency, of living in a self-driven plot entirely aligned with the divine "will," with Cromwell's intricate plotting--in both senses of the term [1]. For Henry VIII, the monarch's "pleasure" is inextricable from history's unfolding, for all intents and purposes is history.  He need not be self-conscious about himself as a character in God's providential story, for what he does can only be what God wants, and vice-versa.  In practice, the king is less of an independent agent than he believes.  ("If he wants a wife, fix him one," the spirit of Wolsey mutters in Cromwell's head. "I didn't, and I am dead" [67].)  It is the job of his servants to think in terms of making and remaking the king's reality, and Cromwell is the novel's chief artificers, always fixated on human beings as both storytellers and characters.  "It's interesting, George Boleyn's version of his life" (60), Cromwell reflects (with some irony) at one point, aware that he, too, figures as an apparently passive figure in someone else's tale.    But even though Cromwell's POV is necessarily limited, he comes far closer than the king to the state of omniscient narrator: after all, "[t]he affairs of the whole realm are whispered in his ear, and so plural are his offices under the Crown that the great business of England, parchment and roll awaiting stam and signet, is pushed or pulled across his desk, to himself or from himself" (71).  It is Cromwell who can see the farthest into past, present, and future, who can admit to himself that the Princess Mary is "the future" (89), and who, much more ominously, can pick up a fleeting insinuation from George Boleyn's sinister wife that will "affix itself and adhere to certain sentences of his own, not yet formed" (96). 

And here the past grows malleable, for, far more than the king, Cromwell makes history.  Although Cromwell thinks her as almost his own double--"[e]verything she does is calculated, like everything he does" (204)--Anne Boleyn's fatal mistake, in fact, is to believe that she is equally capable of doing the same.   "'Since my coronation, there is a new England,'" Anne tells Cromwell.  "'It cannot subsist without me.'"  To which boast, Cromwell silently replies, "Not so, madam [...] If need be, I can separate you from history" (110).  Anne imagines herself part of the modern national body, a kind of new Eve in a revitalized (Protestant) English paradise; Cromwell, whose day-to-day work is all about modernization, sees history as something constantly in flux, amenable to careful handling.  Sometimes, these changes are merely a shift in perspective, as when Cromwell learns that his abusive father saved him from criminal prosecution; how, he repeatedly muses to himself, should he re-envision their relationship, under those circumstances? Or should he? At other times, though, the past can be deliberately reworked.  Both he and Anne are the constant subject of unfortunate rumors, but Cromwell can afford to be amused by the accumulation of increasingly fantastic tales about his deviltry, none of which can be marshaled into a coherent story.  The same is not true for the rumors about Anne. "What is the nature of the border between truth and lies?" somebody wonders (perhaps Cromwell, perhaps a different narrator).  "It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings, and twisted tales" (159).  Cromwell's ability to make a desirable past, as it were, derives from his ability to operate precisely in this liminal space.  "Of course, it never happened," he cheerfully tells someone about the king's apparent death in a jousting accident (173).  The king believes that his "pleasure" and God's will coincide perfectly; Cromwell, making no such grandiose claims for himself, tells stories that will appear real enough to suit present needs.

There have been debates about the ethics of historical fiction since historical fiction has been around.  One could argue that Cromwell models exactly the kind of narrative that opponents of historical fiction have always denounced: the sensationalized tale of private crime, mucking about with the images of history's heroes.  Cromwell thinks to himself at one point that "[i]f he acts against Anne he hopes for a cleaner way" (223), but the narrative he puts together is unavoidably dirty.  Anne's relationship with Harry Percy, revised once to suit the king, Cromwell now revises again to suit the king in a very different way (251); Anne's cousin Mary Shelton "does not know what she has witnessed" when Anne quarrels with Henry Norris, but Cromwell hears "treason" (260); Anne's brother George visits Anne in private, and Cromwell finds a "'crime against nature'" (267).  As I said in the beginning, it makes no difference at all to the narrative if any of these things are true.  Cromwell understands verisimilitude: from the wispiest of evidence (the charge of incest explicitly derives from things neither seen nor heard), he can craft a fine realist narrative that certainly appears to refer to the world beyond itself.  If obvious referents do not immediately present themselves, then he can force them into being.  Thinking of Mark Smeaton, Cromwell observes that "[i]f he told the truth about Anne, he is guilty.  If he lied about Anne, he is hardly innocent" (282); every possible option rebounds to the benefit of the particular tale he wants to tell.  Cromwell takes guilt and innocence, unanchors them from commonsensical notions of their meaning, and reframes them.  As he pithily sums it up to himself, "He needs guilty men.  So he has found men who are guilty.  Though perhaps not guilty as charged" (330). However, the tale will be to the audience's liking; the king will buy.    Buying, of course, means real-world effects: Cromwell's fiction becomes historical reality, at least until it is eventually unpacked, some centuries down the road. 

Here, though, is where things break down.   Cromwell prides himself that he is essential: "Let them try to pull him down.  They will find him armoured, they will find him entrenched, they will find him stuck like a limpet to the future" (406).  And yet, what the reader hears at this moment is Anne Boleyn, insisting on her organic oneness with the new England.  Cromwell the storyteller is not, after all, omnisciently telling his own tale; he cannot hear the echo that predicts his coming destruction, any more than he registers the greater significance of his own admission that he and Anne are very similar.  A novel's narrator may aspire to figurative godhood, but Cromwell turns out to be a limited point-of-view, in more ways than one. 

[1] Although she doesn't develop the point, Frances Wilson puts her finger on it when she suggests that "his job was to edit Henry's plots: to erase his queen, cancel his inconvenient daughters and terminate those chapters in the narrative which were getting tedious."

The Hebrew's Daughter

We haven't had any religious poetry in a while, so let's turn to W. Henry Ludlow's The Hebrew's Daughter, A Fragment of a Jewish Tradition, in Five Cantos (comp. 1852; pub. 1854).  This appears to have been Ludlow's only foray into the world of any sort of verse--that he was willing to put before the public, at least.  As the poem's title suggests, it participates in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of "fragment" verse, poems whose purportedly mangled forms echoed the contemporary fascination with ruins; certainly, ruin, in both its figurative and literal sense, turns out to be the poem's order of the day.  Ludlow tries some cautious experiments with rhyme and meter, writing primarily in iambic tetrameter couplets but sometimes veering from trimeter to pentameter (especially in the big storm scene) or breaking out into triplets, quatrains, and envelope rhymes.  Not surprisingly, the poem's formal technique is not thrilling.  But for those interested in Jewish subjects in Victorian poetry, this poem is interesting for two reasons: its reworking of the Shylock mythos and its subversion of the by-then conventional Jewish conversion narrative. 

First, the plot.  Elam has a daughter, Zillah, for whom he seeks a possible guardian after the death of her mother.  The mother in question was a secret Christian convert who tutored Zillah in the basics, and so, Zillah "was led more faith to place,/On Christian oaths, than do her race" (10).  This turns out to be a problem when Elam temporarily decamps.  Alas, Elam had refused a loan to a supposed Christian, Hun; in revenge, Hun seduces Zillah (words only, no action), then locks her up in prison until one of his followers finally decides that this is really not quite the thing.  Elam, who returns to find himself sans child, threatens Hun with a scary magic spell, then takes off for the Holy Land.  Zillah also takes off for the Holy Land.  And so does Hun, who is, dare we say, not feeling so great about himself.  Due to divine intervention beyond our control, Zillah and Hun are shipwrecked; Hun, continuing to not feel so great, rescues Zillah (who, understandably, runs away very fast once she sees his face).  After much stereotypical wandering and lamenting, Zillah finds her father on the brink of death, obtains his forgiveness, and--after he repents of cursing Hun--watches him die in peace.  Then...she goes insane, leaving us with Hun sadly watching over her, hoping "to see once more arise/The light of reason in her eyes!" (59)

As this plot outline suggests, Ludlow begins by using Shylock to structure his plot: Elam, who embodies the Law, is the money-lending father; Zillah, who embodies Love, is his Christian-tending daughter; Hun is the Christian in need of cash.  The legalistic Jewish father and the emotional Jewish daughter are par for the course in fictions about the Jews.  Most often, the former symbolically gives way to the latter, with the tyrannically masculine Law superseded by the rule of feminized Love.  In that sense, the Shylock plot and the conversion plot are always bound up in each other.  Ludlow further emphasizes that link with another familiar figure from conversion narratives, the secret Christian convert: the deceased mother (in the Shylock plot, she generally is) had "taught her, ere she died/The creed of Jesus crucified," with the proviso "not to let her Father see/Her to the Saviour bend the knee" (10).  Zillah thus exists in an ambiguous space, Jewish in public but Christian in private; further ambiguity arises from that allusion to "her Father," which immediately refers to Elam but, more problematically, also suggests God the Father, whose Son she does not openly avow.   As a result, the symbolic transition from Judaism to Christianity, from paternal Law to maternal Love, stumbles badly.    This deliberate narrative botch gets only worse once we consider Hun, about whom "nothing certain was there known" (9), and who enacts the Shylockian conversion romance only to lock Zillah up in a Gothic tower. Neither secretly-Christian mother nor nominally-Christian lover can conduct Zillah to Christian community.

Instead, Zillah's chunk of the plot takes her back to the father's Law.  Meeting him once again, she confesses her sins at his request, and is forgiven for her "disobedience" (52).  Yet here the abortive conversion plot rears its head again, for Zillah finds no rest in this paternal forgiveness.  Although Elam is allowed a "good death" once he retracts his curse against Hun, Zillah's agony over her sin leads to fantasize that all of nature condemns her as his "murderess" (55), and all that is left of her is "reason's wreck" (55).  What are we to make of this? Zillah's mental collapse resonates tellingly with the state of Judaism in the rest of the poem, and it is here that we see how the poem's fragmentary form embodies its attitude to post-Christian Jews.  Like so many others, Ludlow relies heavily on the complaint as the dominant mode of Jewish utterance: Elam, for example, sadly asks why Jerusalem's "children roam/In foreign lands as if they hated home?/Why did our God forsake our chosen land,/And let his temple fall by heathen band?" (48)  Similarly, the insane Zillah bursts out into a hymn that, even as it promises that the Jews shall one day be restored, nevertheless sobs along with "Judah's daughter's ever weeping" (58).  Even before the tragedy plays out, Zillah and Elam are already part of the band of Jews who "wander far,/Nor have they now a guiding star" (5), and this vision of eternal exile and dislocation recurs in Ludlow's repeated descriptions of both Zillah and Elam as physically and/or mentally "wandering."  As wanderers without guidance or goal, both Zillah and Elam seem eternally condemned to life without a fully-developed narrative arc.  Zillah's strange in-between state as disobedient Jew but not-quite Christian further underlines the incompleteness in which these characters live; it is no accident that their apparently cyclical return to the Holy Land is merely yet another reminder that they have been displaced, with no right to enter Jerusalem.  In that sense, Zillah's return to her father and the Law he represents is equally fragmented: she can neither re-enter her first spiritual "home" nor transition to the Christian community putatively associated with her mother.  Well before 1890s psychological theory, Ludlow makes "madness" the understandable outcome of such a shattered, "wandering" existence [1].

Despite the poem's title, Zillah winds up exiled from the conversion plot.  It is Hun, the villain, who dedicates his life to protecting the mad Zillah as what appears to be self-imposed penance.  And it is Hun who is on the receiving end of the poem's finger-wagging moral: "I pity all whose mental strife/Was such as gall'd Hun's later life;/Remorse of those who late repent,/Is heaviest of punishment" (59).  Yes, says the reader, but isn't he rather better off than Zillah? Elam, the staunch Jew who finally repents, is saved from pain at the last moment; Hun, the professed Christian turned real Christian, repents and spends the remainder of his life undergoing what we are to assume is divinely-ordained agony; Zillah, who abandoned her faith and tried to return, is left to a suffering she cannot possibly interpret.  The Christian may get the poem's last word, but "bad" Christians who abuse their faith also, by extension, bear the weight of the poem's moral condemnation. 

[1] On which see Carol Margaret Davison, Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 145-46.

 

Random top ten lists are random

I love lists.  Newspapers also love lists, because they elevate their sites' hit counts.  Take, for example, this list of "The 10 Best Historical Novels," which is the sort of thing guaranteed to make someone like yours truly prick up their ears (focus their eyes?).  It may have been designed to be deliberately irritating.  Or, alternately, it merely exemplifies the inherent bizarreness of any such list--only ten novels? From the entire history of the historical novel? Across the globe?  Aside from a brief foray into Russia for War and Peace (which, if one has to make this kind of list, belongs there) and Italy for The Leopard (which probably also qualifies), the list sticks to British, Irish, and American novels.  Which are, ahem, all in print, and possibly available from the Guardian's online bookshop.  (I winced at the sight of Wolf Hall, which is a fine novel, but seems to be in here primarily for promotional purposes.)   Except for W&P and The Leopard, any one of these novels could easily be swapped for something else, and quite possibly something better: Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), Stendahl's Le Rouge et Le Noir, Shusako Endo's Silence or The Samurai...I could go on (but won't).  Moreover, these novels all fit relatively neatly into the traditional paradigm of historical novels set fully in the past, seeking to avoid all but "necessary anachronism": ergo, no Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, no A. S. Byatt's Possession, no James Robertson's The Fanatic, to give three totally random examples.  In other words, this list seems to assume a definition of "the historical novel" that it never really states, even though "the historical novel" is an exceptionally fluid category.  Magical realist historical fiction (e.g., Gabriel Garcia Marquez...)? Science fiction/fantasy historical fiction (e.g., Octavia Butler...)?  Gothic historical fiction (e.g., Sir Walter Scott, whose absence from this list is pretty eye-popping...)? 

But perhaps the list will sell some good books, so there's that. 

Sherlock: "A Scandal in Belgravia"

One cannot have Sherlock Holmes around for very long without The Woman putting in an appearance.  In Sherlock's version of "A Scandal in Bohemia," Irene Adler, a lesbian dominatrix (what else?), is using some very explicit photographs on her cell phone to bargain for protection against being killed by...the CIA, it appears, but then again, maybe not.  (The CIA, it gets around.)  Oh, and of course, there's Moriarty: all Sherlock Holmes adaptations abhor a Moriarty vacuum.  Plus bizarre terrorism decoy plots involving corpses on a plane. Meanwhile, the royal equivalent to His Highness in "A Scandal in Bohemia" is all but invisible and irrelevant, with only her (bound--see "lesbian dominatrix") feet making a brief foray onto the screen.   There are times when this series' ninety-minute format seems to require pumping unnecessary air into Conan Doyle's original plot, and this would be one of them.

The "it's always Moriarty" issue (as opposed to "it's never lupus" on the soon-to-be-late House) does get at the series' insistent self-reflexivity.  After all, it's always been Moriarty for decades now: often, Sherlock seems to be primarily about Sherlock Holmes adaptations and our expectations thereof.  Although wink-wink-nudge-nudge quotation tends to be an occupational hazard of any pastiche--I swear, the next Holmesian author to invoke any variation on "the game's afoot" will get a disciplinary visit from Col. Sebastian Moran--Sherlock is just as invested in the Holmes industry.   Thus, this time around, we had puns on the original story titles ("The Geek Interpreter," "The Navel Treaty"), but we also had the sudden appearance of the omnipresent deerstalker.  (Remember, boys and girls: Conan Doyle's Holmes wouldn't wear a deerstalker while rambling about London.)  Similarly, Irene Adler as would-be love interest? Been there.  Dumbed-down Mycroft? Yep, done that.  Jokes about Holmes and Watson as gay couple? That too.  At this point, there's nothing to do for the series to do except wink at its own lack of originality; it is, as Harold Bloom might say (if Harold Bloom could be brought to pronounce about a TV series...), belated. 

That being said, the series does some interesting things with the shift from Watson as professional chronicler to Watson as amateur blogger.  (No news yet about whether or not the good doctor has monetized his site, although goodness only knows what kind of Google ads it would run.)  The spontaneity and interactivity of blogging suggests a more intimate relationship between the narrator and his audience; although the novels and tales include occasional metafictional reflections on how Watson is constructing a certain kind of private detective, the shift to blogging brings up the possibility that the audience may actively collaborate in the comments section.  If you look at the link I posted just above, you can see that the fictional comments are given to bad puns, along with grumpy observations from the detective himself; Holmes doesn't just complain to Watson about the narration, he does so in public.  Watson still "buffers" and humanizes Holmes, but this Holmes' media celebrity, and his role (willing or otherwise) in shaping it plays a much more substantial role in the plot.  There's a sense, that is, that the audience can be in on the "joke."  And, by the same token, this John Watson's prose is informal, off-the-cuff, and in brief: the new media Sherlock has to be easily consumed by iPhone, in much the same way that the series can really be consumed by convenient PBS app.  He's more portable, but he's also figured as less distant, even if he's still as chilly and eccentric as Conan Doyle's Holmes ever was.  

Plotting Aliss

If there's one thing that seems to make would-be adapters of Alice in Wonderland throw their figurative teacups, it's the book's lack of a plot.  As a character, Alice is flat: she engages and disengages from each encounter with ease, neither changing nor changed by anyone she encounters.  One could hardly expect realist plot development in a book that works by dream logic, after all.  Alas, what works on the page often deflates with a bathetic whoosh when translated into dramatic form, which explains why adaptations keep trying to impose something in the immediate vicinity of a wisp of a plot onto the material.  Not that novelists don't encounter the same problem.  Of his own bleak appropriation of Alice in Wonderland, Aliss,  Patrick Senécal has said that "[m]on livre devait être plus qu’une série de scènes flyées et c’était justement le risque le plus grand. Il fallait qu’il y ait un but à tout cela. Aliss ne devait pas être qu’une touriste qui se paie la traite pendant cinq cents pages. Il fallait qu’elle cherche quelque chose."  Senecal's very practical acknowledgment of his narrative problem interests me precisely because Aliss' quest, which structures the novel, runs counter to the effectively plotless nature of life in Aliss' Wonderland, Daresbury.  Or, rather, life in Daresbury aspires to not having a plot; characters who think in terms of plot, of development or self-discovery, wind up plotted out.

Aliss fantasizes that her personal quest is a Nietzchean one: she yearns first to become, then to encounter Superwoman, whom she believes to be Daresbury's ruler, the Red Queen.   Given that Aliss has a rather faint grasp of Nietzche, as both her professor and Chess (the novel's Cheshire Cat) point out, it comes as no surprise that she misreads Nietzche's Ubermensch.  Skimming Also Sprach Zarathustra, she joyously concludes that she has come to Daresbury "pour surmonter le petit, le misérable, le commun, le bien!  Car tout ça est obstacle au surhomme...ou a la surfemme!"¹  In other words, Aliss reads the Ubermensch primarily in terms of freedom, originality, and self-expression, without attending to his purposefulness or mission.    As the Red Queen brutally informs her at the trial that concludes the novel's main action, this is a juvenile interpretation of the text.  The Ubermensch seeks "un absolu," indeed, to improve all mankind (504), neither of which interests the Queen in the slightest; as far as she is concerned,  "'[y] a pas de place pour le surhomme, ici! Y a pas de place pour cette nouvelle morale!'" (505) The only "quest" that interests the Queen is for her own absolute power (506)--for pure and absolute agency as such, without any justifying goal or end.  So much for the developmental aspects of Nietzche's will to power.  

Not only does Daresbury try to disavow development, but it also does the same with reciprocity.  For lack of a better way of putting it, there is little-to-no sense of subjectivity in Daresbury, of other people as selves with their own independent interiority and moral life.  Those characters with substantive friendships or romantic relationships in Daresbury appear to simply collapse into each other, as though they were aspects of the same person.  Bone and Chair (Flesh), the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, are the most prominent example of this phenomenon:  they share the same quest (of which more in a moment), live in the same house, engage in the same punning games (to everyone else's annoyance), and, as Aliss notices, speak in the same voice.  Even when they're having sex with someone else, both of them are still involved.    They appear separately exactly once, and even then, Chair turns out to be merely hanging about outside.  Buddies Micha and Hugo (Tweedledee and Tweedledum) and sadomasochists Mickey and Minnie (!) prove to be similarly attached at the hip.  But lose half the couple, as Aliss discovers to her cost with Mickey, and the other doesn't necessarily engage in the sort of mourning one might expect for a beloved, for another person entitled to "I."  Any demand to be treated as an "I," or to treat another as an "I," eventually short-circuits--often fatally.  Andromaque (the Duchess), the only woman in Daresbury to bear a child, is ultimately destroyed by both her belief in an obligation to her baby and her eventual rejection of it; Aliss' landlady, who wants thanks from the Red Queen, is killed instead; Aliss wrongly believes that saving Mickey from torture means that he will be appropriately grateful.  In Carroll's Alice, the title character is always kept at an emotional distance from the weird figures she encounters, and vice-versa.   But here, Alice's perpetual detachment returns as the quarter's governing rule: it's possible to function almost as a single "I," as in the case of Bone and Chair (practically an old married couple, after all--they've been together for over two decades), but it's not possible to be separate and relate in anything except the most superficial way.  Even someone relatively friendly, like Verrue (the Caterpillar), is still not much of a friend. 

In her fantasy that she has engaged the Red Queen's affections, Aliss exemplifies the faith in both plotting and subjectivity that makes her an object of contempt in Daresbury.  But it is Bone and Chair's personal quest that embodies, I think, the novel's best-developed model (so to speak...) of an anti-plot.  As Aliss discovers at the novel's terrifying mad tea party, Bone and Chair are doctors (who studied at McGill!) eternally in search of the soul.  That is, the lack thereof, as Bone explains:  "Mais pour dire que quelque chose n'existe pas, il faut ne l'avoir jamais trouvé [...] Comme le monstre du Loch Ness.  Jusqu'a preuve du contraire, il n'existe pas puisqu'on ne l'a jamais déniché, vous voyez? Il doit en être de meme pour l'ame.  Pour etre certain qu'elle n'existe pas, il faut ne pas la trouver" (313).  Seeking not to find, Bone and Chair engage in repetitive (albeit...original) acts of torture that reduce their human subjects to corpses--corpses that, in turn, are repurposed as art objects of a distinctly unpleasant sort (the "sculpture," the Red Queen's little installations) or visual puns (as per the usual with Bone and Chair).  Instead of treating humans as an end, Bone and Chair "playfully" think of them as a gory means to a journey that can have no end.  Torture treated as one of the fine arts, as it were.  The only punctuation to this gruesomely joyous quest comes from their own sexual arousal, which--perhaps in a silent pun--becomes indistinguishable from dealing death: after Aliss unwillingly witnesses them dismembering a man, she sees them staring at each other in a "[t]ranse animale, transe de plaisir, transe orgasmique, presque" (325), which shortly gives way to actual sex amongst the entrails (327).   As we see much later on, transitioning from torture to enthusiastic sex is their usual (unappealing) routine.  Clotilde Landais quite rightly argues that the novel defines Aliss' quest-romance in terms of its cascading failure; because Aliss can move from "test" to test only by dosing herself with Macros, Micros, and Royales, Landais suggests, she never makes any progress, and "elle n’est pas allée « au bout de tout » comme elle le souhaitait, dans la mesure où, fondamentalement, elle se faisait violence pour parvenir à imiter les autres."²  In effect, Aliss must somehow wrestle herself into a linear plot defined by a transcendent goal.   By contrast, Bone's and Chair's quest-romance (which really is a very different sort of romance...) glories in its cyclical failure, even turns failure into erotic celebration.  Aliss deceives herself into believing that she's progressing toward something new and different; Bone and Chair, whose entire project depends on no progress, no alteration in their self-perceptions or beliefs, deliriously and exultingly launch themselves towards nothing at all.

¹ Patrick Senécal, Aliss (Québec, Canada: Alire, 2000), 162.  (Please excuse any missing accents.) 

² Landais makes a similar point elsewhere: "La libération sexuelle de l’héroïne est donc achevée, tout comme l’explosion de son ancien corps qui résulte de cette frénésie sexuelle, mais cela n’a pu se faire que sous l’emprise de la drogue. Cette nécessité pour Aliss de se droguer afin de se libérer de ses inhibitions révèle un écart entre son moi réel et celui qu’elle souhaite projeter."

 

 

The metablogging continues

Of the responses to a recent talk she delivered about blogging, Rohan Maitzen comments that "[m]aybe people were taking for granted that blogging could be beneficial in the ways I was describing and so didn’t need to ask about it, but the impression I got (perhaps unfairly) was that they couldn’t quite imagine those benefits trumping the low likelihood of professional rewards for the time spent."  Concrete "rewards" from blogging tend to be, at best, random: the CoHE buys one of your blog posts; somebody invites you to a conference; you're asked to review books; somebody takes one of your posts and quotes it in a book¹.  "Communication," as Rohan suggests, seems to be a better way of thinking about what academic bloggers do when they write about their scholarly work and lives.  Not simply the results of one's research, but also how that research interfaces with teaching, with family life--even, I suppose, with one's cat developing an aggravating taste for rare leatherbound Victorian periodicals.  I don't want to trot out the word "relatable," if only because legions of students will consign me to the Eighth Circle for hypocrisy, but perhaps "demystifying" will do.  Even if the demystification involves revealing that some academics spend an awful lot of time reading rather unreadable Victorian fiction, because sometimes, that's just what you have to do in order to responsibly achieve your scholarly goals...

A different question might be: is the communication heard or overheard, to borrow from John Stuart Mill? Much of my writing about Victorian religious fiction, for example, is primarily for my own benefit--in effect, I'm using the blog as a repository of notes to myself about particular texts, some of which I'll plunder later for more formal writing.  I'm dubious about the use of a blog as an alternative site for peer review (see "random," above), unless one has publicity mechanisms in place to ensure that the most useful readers show up; there's a reason that this little article, for which I wanted peer review (and not in the "jump-through-hoops" way), started out as a deleted blog post.  (Among other things, it's not at all in this blog's usual niche.)  That being said, I've found that blogging has been most valuable in reshaping my academic prose--more relaxed, less Englishese (although I have to discipline my habit of indulging in parentheticals like, er, this one).  I don't think that Book Two is about to rival Dan Brown or Stephen King in sales any time soon, assuming that its contract goes through (my apologies to the publisher...), but I also don't think you need to be a certified English professor in order to read it, either. 

¹ Which is why I finally broke down and listed TLP on my CV, under "other publications":  there's no point in continuing to erase the existence of a blog that's being cited in scholarly works! 

Maleficium

One rarely expects a novella published in the 2000s to read like it was published in the 1890s, but so Martine Desjardins' Maleficium (2009; trans. 2012) does.  By that, I don't mean that the novel is necessarily pastiching late-nineteenth century French or English style, which would be a dangerous judgment call to make in any case about a translation.  But to me, at least, the novel exudes Decadence, of a sort that Joris-Karl Huysmans or Oscar Wilde would immediately recognize: the erotically-charged obsessions with exotic objects, the aestheticization of sin, the subordination of the natural world to human artistry, the omnipresence of yet blasphemies against Catholicism.  The campy, kitschy quality of the novel's "horrors," though, which often tip right over into black comedy, come straight out of the early Gothics of William Beckford and Horace Walpole (seriously, dangerous ear wax?); in many ways, Maleficium descends straight from the so-called "Oriental Tale," which influenced Beckford's Vathek.  

In good Gothic form, Maleficium (an allusion to the Malleus Maleficarum) is a found manuscript, the supposed memoirs of a Catholic priest named Jerome Savoie.  But Savoie has nothing to say in his own voice; instead, he hovers just off the page, recording the confessions of seven men and one woman (and thereby violating the seal of the confessional, which prefigures all the violations to follow).  Here, the magical number seven evokes the Seven Deadly Sins, all of which manifest themselves in each confession.  Although the precise nature of the sin and its punishment changes each time, the confessions--prose dramatic monologues, as it were--fall into virtually identical shapes.  Each time, a Canadian man goes abroad to India, the Middle East, or Africa, searching for some exotic thing (a perfect soap, a rare insect) which he hopes to bring back home in order to achieve fame and fortune.  Each time, the man encounters a young woman, her face disfigured by what appears to be a hare lip, whose allure he finds both irresistible and slightly puzzling.  His brief acquaintance with her always skirts on the edge of or tips over into sexual violation, but a terrible retribution inevitably follows--losing a nose, developing agonizingly sensitive skin, succumbing to permanent vertigo.  And this punishment always destroys, or at least subverts, the man's public, professional life (the doctor's discolored skin puts off patients; the spice dealer loses his sense of smell).  In the final tale, however, the young woman herself appears, representing herself as a would-be Scheherazade whose story-telling, far from preserving her life, has inadvertently replicated itself in the most perverse of ways.

Although I suggested that this novella has some affinities with Decadence, the confessional plots all borrow heavily from Catholic traditions going back to the Middle Ages: miracle tales, implicit or explicit deals with the devil, martyrdom.  The unnamed woman, inaccessible herself until the final tale, is repeatedly associated with the demonic, especially in her perverse crossing of orthodox iconography with outright blasphemy.  In the first tale, for example, she appears as a virgin who repeatedly develops miraculous stigmata and casts the speaker as Doubting Thomas (15), yet she speaks with a "hissing voice" (11) and boasts that she has "'one more stigma'" than Christ (14).  Later, she crops up as a missionary with a pair of glasses purchased in Damascus, but pokes fun at the narrator by twisting the parable of the Prodigal Son ("'Don't tell me you've lost your way again, and are waiting to be found'" [82]).  And as a botanist's assistant obsessed with gardens and roses, she sprouts hair "like a brambly, bushy thicket" (98) that turns out to be a "crown of thorns" (105)--or, as she keeps insisting, "prickles."   Several of the men profess themselves shocked at her outright heretical opinions, yet their sinful natures drive them straight into her clutches.   In a novella that is actually quite short on female characters, she plays the role of woman-the-temptress, and physical contact with her turns out to be figuratively emasculating; the greed for possession that drives all the men concentrates itself on a female body that violently repels the touch it seems to invite.  When the collector of Persian carpets "thrust[s] my fingers  into her curls," he finds that "the shooting pain of a thousand needles stabbed my palms" (105): the penetrating male finds himself agonizingly penetrated in return.  (About the only thing this novel is missing is a vagina dentata.)

And in a sense, the woman's confession is about how men transform femininity into the embodiment of evil.  (It's in some ways analogous to Michele Roberts' novel Impossible Saints, which decomposes the female saint's life into a series of increasingly violent assaults against women's bodies.)  Like Jane Eyre, the young woman finds herself an unwanted orphan, tossed into a household filled entirely with hostile boys and a father who "'can suffer no feminine presence in this house'" (126).  The father's wife, it turns out, has been injustly incarcerated  in an insane asylum; the interchangeable and alphabetically-named sons are startled to find that "'girls cry'" (128).  The young woman, who yearns for books, becomes obsessed with a random geography textbook, and soon discovers that her newfound cousins have never heard of storytelling.  Their home implicitly casts the world of science and fact as masculine, fiction and make-believe as the banished feminine; significantly, the father's forbidden library contains biological specimens, the natural world reduced to mere objects, which the young woman nevertheless responds to in terms of their "form and color" (132).  Enter Scheherezade, weaving stories each night out of her cousins' suggestions and the geography text.  Here, the Biblical analogies both begin to proliferate and to lose their coherence, for this interplay of masculine "fact" and feminine "fiction" produces what this confession casts as a new Fall.  The young woman's exoticizing play with far-off lands suddenly returns in the boys' discovery that they, too, can tell stories--but about the locals, "irremediably blacken[ing] the reputation of honest merchants, generous elders and virtuous mothers" (134).  The joyous pleasures of feminine make-believe give birth to masculine lies.  Although our storyteller takes the blame, where does it actually belong: with the girl's innocent play, or with the boys' perverted use of imagination for power? Her hare lip, which turns out to be inflicted by the father as an "osculum infame," intended to mark her out forever as one who speaks with a "forked tongue" (138), initially marks the victory of man's lies (and the revolting additional punishment that follows establishes the origins of all the sexual overtones in the preceding confessions).  Yet it also suggests that the real Fall of this world predated her arrival: she is brutalized precisely because her storytelling remained in the Edenic domain of pure play, while her revelation of the imagination's infinite possibilities was warped and perverted by men already obsessed with worldly conquest and domination. 

One common narrative of the Fall, then, gives way to another reading, a kind of unfortunate fall after the Fall.  Revising the cousins' narratives, which literalized her own stories, she claims that "[t]hey hunted me down, and each time inflicted new torments upon me" (138).  Her initial violation returns in their attempts to appropriate her very self, to erase her identity as the object of their assaults, and to imagine plots in which "they assume the victim's role" (139).  But this reading seems to be as distorted as those of her cousins--certainly, the confessions we hear cast the young woman as the second coming of Satan, but they also narrate (if only via dramatic irony) the sins that brought them low in the first place.  The difficulty here is that she has hitherto existed solely as the deadly focus of her cousins' tales, and those tales mesh ever-so-nicely with Jerome Savoie's own sinfulness as a "voyeur of the ear" (139).  Interrupting the flow of masculine narratives, but still forced to recite for a masculine author, the young woman cannot escape the fallen world of man's lust; even when speaking, she remains entrapped.  And her image of herself, as a "demon of vengeance, the sum of their calumnies" (139), makes her evil the embodiment of man's fallen storytelling, his lies.  Everyone, including Jerome Savoie, exists in this damned, bitter world, in which the Edenic imagination turns into one more machine of violence.  The only escape, the demon suggests, may be to enter a world where no more stories can be heard (and Savoie, too, comes in for his appropriate punishment).  But Savoie writes down the confessions that were supposed to remain forever silent, a matter between the penitent, the priest, and God, threatening the reader with "the stain of these depraved communications" (x).  Yet weren't we reading the confessions for the "stain," the pleasure in another's evil? And wouldn't we, perhaps, be rather bored if no evil were to be found?