bibliographing

Last Friends by Jane Gardam

2013-06-02T16:21:01Z

In the June issue of Open Letters Monthly, I review Last Friends, the third of Jane Gardam’s Filth novels.

Interlude: well of course Agatha Christie is political

2013-05-29T02:23:52Z

José Rodrigues dos Santos asked in The Guardian whether Agatha Christie was political—as a novelist, presumably—a question I already had my own ideas about. My interest piqued, I waded into what turned out to be a curious column loaded with bizarre assumptions. Rodrigues dos Santos begins by mentioning three novels, including one by Christie, that he determines (with no explanation) “are not political.” Rodrigues dos Santos does, helpfully, define politics, as “an activity related to the management of societies,” but after mentioning a few more novels that are political, including 1984 and The Grapes of Wrath, he asks whether this second list should be considered superior to the first because they are political. What?

Apparently, “[t]hese are not easy questions, but they do point in different directions and help us clarify things a bit. A novel can be literary without an obvious political message. And the fact that the novel has a political message is not tantamount to a quality novel.” Did anyone ever think novels couldn’t be literary without an obvious political message, or that political novels are higher-quality? OVertly political novels run a very real risk of being didactic rather than artful. I felt like I had accidentally stumbled into a Socialist Realist time warp reading insights about how “[a] literary work can be political or not political, and yet be a literary work.”

Rodrigues dos Santos ends by saying that Christie is indeed a political novelist because the message of a work like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is “thou shalt not kill.” I won’t argue that this isn’t a political message, but it misses too much of Christie’s politics for me to let this pass unnoted. Christie was a political novelist in two ways.

The first is related, as Rodrigues dos Santos points out, to the murder investigations themselves. Both Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple not only investigate crimes but decide what to do about what they find out. They make decisions about what to keep secret, from whom, for how long, even in some cases letting the criminal “get away with it” (usually via suicide, however). Both detectives also have frequent religious references in their stories.

But there’s another bit of politics in Christie’s work. In The Hollow, a young cousin makes a fool of himself spouting socialist bromides to a salesgirl he takes for idle rich. In 4:50 from Paddington, the ridiculously charitable doctor who will only work for the still-new NHS is a particularly depraved murderer. In A Murder Is Announced, Christie makes another young Communist look foolish.

This second bit is funnier, though the first is more important—but it’s also much, much more than “thou shalt not kill.” Every reader of mysteries knows that detectives are ethical beings who make different choices about right and wrong, in both solving and disposing of the crimes they investigate.

The marvelous misadventures of the good soldier Švejk

2013-05-28T13:07:47Z

The Good Soldier Švejk is a picaresque novel of The Great War. Its title character is a Czech everyman, slow-witted, cunning, or most likely some combination of both, who wends his way very slowly from a Vienna bar to the Eastern Front, taking turns as the batman for a few people slightly more important than himself, and in prison for various misdemeanors and misunderstandings (and often for some combination of both). In episode after episode, nothing can really touch Švejk, though he rarely ends up any better off, either.

I tend to have what seems like more tolerance than average for picaresques; I rarely care too much about plot anyway, and my favorite picaresques have an overarching structure to their episodes that gives them form without subjecting them to many of the conventions of a more traditional novel-length plot. Švejk may be missing such a structure because it is unfinished, but in fact the way the episodes bounce around chaotically also serves one of the novels most important themes: the absurdity of pretty much everything. The war, certainly; also the Austro-Hungarian Empire; also its army and perhaps all armies; certainly the law and bureaucracy.

And the episodes tend in themselves toward the abusrd—especially when Švejk does have his run-ins with the law. Almost inevitably, Švejk displays to the authorities “the godlike composure of an innocent child,” “radiat[ing]” “unconcern and innocence…from the whole of his being”—and putting them right off their game. As Cecil Parrott notes in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition:

He is a complete match for any of the soldiers or N.C.O.s who are unlucky enogh to be his escorts. He is capable of reducing Lieutenant Dub to a state of speechlessness. At the same time he has a disarming way of attracting the admiration and approval of some stupid general or colonel. He has ‘a way with him’. Few people, not even stern judge advocates, can resist his good-natured but unflinching blue eyes.

He appeals to his superiors by unrelentingly agreeing with them, even about his own stupidity. And with episode after episode showing how absurdly the system works—and the Austrian bureaucratic military is certainly a “system”—it’s hard to imagine respecting such a system, the empire it supports, or anything at all about the war it’s fighting.

So what’s wrong with that picture? More on that tomorrow.

Cannon fodder: food for thought

2013-05-27T14:31:45Z

Last week, Sam Sacks wrote in The New Yorker on criticizing the classics and how the canon is selected in today’s world. Contrasting the current, primarily American, state of the canon with that of the past, when the gatekeepers of the ivory tower and the salon determined not just which books were classics but the very definition of the concept, he argues that the classics are now determined by democratic and pragmatic tastes:

What makes a classic today is cultural significance. Authors are anointed not because they are great (although many of them are) but because they are important.

In other words, the current criteria for classics are more a matter of sociology than of aesthetics. That’s why prose-toilers like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are securely fixed in the canon while masters such as Frank O’Connor and Eudora Welty could easily be left out. “1984” and “Brave New World” are embedded in the weave of language and history, but what does Welty have going for her apart from stylistic perfection? Henry Miller survives—and will continue to survive—because the country once found him shocking enough to censor. (Likewise, D. H. Lawrence might very well be a footnote if not for “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”) There’s better prose in the average issue of Consumer Reports than in most Upton Sinclair novels, but “The Jungle” triggered actual legislative reform and will therefore last as long as the United States does.

I hardly consider myself a literary critic, so it’s hardly surprising I wouldn’t feel the same kind of “freedom” or “exhilarat[ion]” Sacks attributes to today’s critics, who can have at many of these classics, spitting into the Grand Canyon (to paraphrase Joyce Carol Oates) because, as it turns out, much of the Grand Canyon isn’t all that grand.* Still, I spend, I think, a fair amount of time doing just that. Great truth and beauty, such as they are, are what move me, but my curious nature draws me as well to the works of “cultural significance,” the important in addition to the great—not to mention the so-called great (since that’s what so many of these “classics” turn out to be). And while I rarely take any joy in savaging such works, or even savage them at all, I find it interesting and even a little bit important to explore the good and the bad, whenever there is any of either to be found. And I may just turn out to be halfway decent at doing it, too.

Even before reading Sacks’s piece (which is, I should say, one of the few written about the idea of “classics” that didn’t make me roll my eyes a single time), I had planned on writing this week about one such work: Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk. Admittedly, Švejk is hardly a part of the canon the way Orwell and Huxley are; I doubt many American high school English classes assign it. But it’s well-known enough to be the namesake of a popular house blend at my local coffee shop, where quotes from the novel sometimes appear on a blackboard, and has enough cult status to have been recommended to me by a “real-life human.”

Švejk is the story of a Czech soldier swept up by the currents of the First World War, fighting for an empire that systemically oppresses his own people. A note at the end of my Penguin Classics edition explains that it was “one of the most famous and widely-read novels published after the First World War,” and that Hašek died before he could complete it. It’s possible that some of my criticisms would have been mooted by a less abrupt ending, but we have what we have.

*This should not be taken as any slight on the actual Grand Canyon, which I have not yet seen, and my experience thus far of natural wonders suggests it really is that grand.

Bring on the drama

2013-03-10T22:23:08Z

As others are haunted about not reading enough women,or enough YA, or enough world literature, I frequently torture myself over how little I read that is not prose (among many, many other things, of course). It’s bad enough the way I read fiction at the expense of nonfiction, the share of the universe of excellent essays and criticism I neglect, but the amount of space in my reading life accorded to poetry and, especially, drama, is pretty pathetic.

I’ve gotten somewhat better in the poetry side of things, and on the nonfiction side as well, though these are both things I find difficult to blog about so you often miss them here. It’s something I’d like to rectify. But to even things out in the drama department (and initially inspired, truth be told, by a Netflix marathon of Kenneth Branagh on recent weekend, along with other similar influences), I recently decided I would finally get around to reading all of Shakespeare’s plays (and finally Ocford Word’s Classics has editions that are actually attractive)–in my own sweet time, of course–as well as get into some Jacobean drama.

The most notable experience of reading the play was noticing how very many lines have become common references or clichés. It’s not just “mine eyes dazzle!”; I basically felt like I knew somewhere between a third and half the play. This is not to denigrate reading it in any way–quite the opposite. It was an enlightening experience, as well as entertaining.

The funny thing is, just as with poetry, and with short stories if I’ve stayed away from them a long time, I was also quickly noticing how much I enjoy reading in the form and wondering why I don’t do more of it. I’ll get to Shakespeare separately, as King Lear certainly deserves its own post, but if you’ve got any Jacobean suggestions I’m all ears.

Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish

2013-03-11T22:22:22Z

As much as I always love New Directions, it’s rare for me to actually read three of their titles in a row, as happened quite by chance with Robinson, Alphabetical Africa, and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. Though I’d call B.S. Johnson’s novel the most avant-garde in the bunch, Abish is no stylistic slouch, and Alphabetical Africa is, say, the most Oulipian.

The formal conceit of the novel is that the first chapter contains only words beginning in ‘a’, the second only words beginning in ‘a’ or ‘b’, and so n, until the middle of the book, when all words are available, and then, chapter-by-chapter, begin disappearing from its lexicon in the reverse of the order they entered it (FILO, for the geeks out there).

Even for those willing to accept the premise that one can write a reasonable novel omitting the more common letter in the language (c.f., Georges Perec, La Disparition), this probably seems like it must inevitably seem nonnaturalistic and extremely formal. There’s no doubt that Alphabetical Africa isn’t a typical novel, but it is a novel—it distinctly tells a story, and fairly clearly—and the strategies Abish uses to fulfill his constraints are varied and successful. It opens thus:

Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement…anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation. Albert argumentatively answers at another apartment. Answers: ants are Ameisen. Are ants Ameisen?

“Ameisen” is the German for “ants.” While far from natural speech, this is also impressively well put together considering the words all start with one letter, and that letter is one that prevents access to some of English’s most important (the, he, she, they, etc.). By the “G” chapter, even though we’re still missing all those, it sounds pretty normal:

Back at Angola, Alex and Allen are buying an expensive chart containing clear directions for finding certain gold amulets. Chart covers four acres. Contemplating chart both are attacked by African ants, forgetting gold amulets and Alva, both flee following African army’s flight also from a determined attack by fierce ants. Author despairs. Abandoned chart carried away by ants. Alex calls Allen: a fucking ant fleeing coward.

The language is still clipped, to deal with those pesky definite articles and personal pronouns, but again, impressively normal I think.

Beyond the formal experimentation, how much value is there in a novel like Alphabetical Africa? Well, as the narrator notes, “Africa is a favorite topic in literature, it gives license to so much excess…” And here, we could look on this entire exercise as excess: is it pure mental masturbation to write such a book? I personally take these works as experiments (as they are) in what language and literature can do. This one did something I thought was possible, but better than I thought possible. Did I mention there’s a real story here? It’s a thriller, by the way. A bizarre, avant-garde, obscene, sometimes ridiculous thriller. But probably more of a curio for me than anything else in the end.

Robinson by Muriel Spark

2013-03-10T19:56:04Z

I’m aiming to do a few “quick hit” type posts this week, both to help get back into the swing and to put off writing about The Good Soldier Švejk for a while (though I should be writing about Švejk immediately after my other war post, sigh).

Today’s I’ve got Robinson, Muriel Spark’s second novel, on the menu. It’s the story of a mid-twentieth-century plane crash of which there are three survivors, stranded on a desert island. Scratch that—the island is not desert, but inhabited by on Robinson (and named after him). Robinson is a man of some independent means who has chosen, for apparently religious reasons, to live basically as a hermit.

The narrator of the novel, January Marlow, is, like a major character in The Comforters, a convert to Catholicism, and though pragmatic is quite serious about the faith. There are Catholic, and specifically Catholic-among-the-English, subtexts to much of the novel. This is a feature of Spark’s writing I’m curious to see develop further as I go further into her novels chronologically, and I don’t have much to say about it at this point other than that Spark seems to me to be an overlooked “Catholic writer,” especially “Anglo-Catholic writer.” I don’t think many put her in the same camp as an Evelyn Waugh or a Graham Greene or a T.S. Eliot (or a Flannery O’Connor or Walker Percy) in this respect, and I’ve been wondering more and more whether they shoud.

As for Robinson itself, it’s an exploration of the bounds of civil society and of trust, of religion and reasonableness, of coping mechanisms for both being alone and being among people, and of the changing behavior and even nature of human beings as they shift from a modern-sized society to a small—perhaps suffocatingly small—group. It’s also a bit of a mystery and a thriller.

I haven’t yet gone wrong with Spark, though she doesn’t always do exactly what I wish she would, and I think that’s probably healthy. I’ll be (slowly) continuing through her oeuvre, and look forward to what more I might discover about her writing and my thoughts on it as I go.

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson

2013-03-08T16:14:48Z

At the beginning of this week, I discussed the morality of Middlemarch, and how the results that Rohan Maitzen was somewhat uncomfortable with rest on the problem that Eliot’s morality is not based on dessert. Today, I’ve got a book about exactly the opposite problem.

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, a 1973 novel by British avant-garde writer B.S. Johnson, features a protagonist who applies the principles of accounting to everyday life. Not in the sense that he balances his checkbook every night, though; he’s balancing his moral accounts with the rest of the world. I should say that there are a lot of stylistic features of Christie Malry that I’m not going to write about, at least not right now, that are wonderful fun (and I have more Johnson sitting next to me as I type).

Christie’s “first reckoning” with the world gives a general idea of what he’s doing. In the debit column, he puts “aggravation[s],” like “unpleasantness of bank manager” (his boss), “restriction of movement due to Edwardian Office Block,” (referring to the fact that he had to walk around rather than through a particular building), and “bulb importuning” (referring to a flower bulb sales flier). Christie assigns monetary values to all these debits—values which are, as they must be, arbitrary, though they seem to have at least some relation to each other. Bulb importuning costs a lot less than his office supervisor’s lack of sympathy about the death of Christie’s mother. But they don’t seem to be related to any external scale.

Meanwhile, the credit column consists of “recompense” for these debits, some of which are actions by others (“small kindnesses from Joan”), but most of which are Christie taking action on his own in an attempt to balance the accounts: he scratches the facade of the office block, refuses to pay his undertaker’s bill, and sends the reply-paid envelope back to the flower bulb company empty. These actions also receive largely arbitrary monetary values, and Christie balances the accounts. But at each reckoning, Christie is owed more and more.

Why would Christie do such strange things? Christie’s motives “are of no importance to use, though the usual clues will certainly be given,” he warns after the first reckoning.

We are concerned with his actions. A man may be defined through his actions, you will remember. We may guess at his motives, of course; he may do so as well. We may also guess at the winner of the three-fifteen at the next meeting at Market Rasen.

The narrator goes on to explore Christie’s childhood and adolescence, explicitly noting that he is creating the character as he goes and that these things will not help the reader understand why Christie had and implemented his “Great Idea,” nor should they be used to judge the use of that idea.

Oh, I could go on and on for pages and pages about Christie’s young life, inventing and observing, remembering and borrowing. But why? All is chaos and unexplainable. These things happened. He is as he is, you are as you are. Act on that: all is chaos. The end is coming, truly. It is just so much wasted effort to attempt to understand anything. Lots of people never had a chance, are ground down, and other clichés. Far from kicking against the pricks, they love their condition and vote conservative.*

So if we should judge Christie based on his actions, on just how he does kick against the pricks, we can look at a few things: the very fact of his reckoning, the way he conducts it, and the actions he takes in life outside of the reckoning. For one thing, he has a girlfriend, and nothing between Christie and his girlfriend is reckoned (nor anything between Christie and his mother, who dies early on). Just as his mother still figures into the reckoning through the actions of other people (e.g., the supervisor’s lack of sympathy), so can his girlfriend, the Shrike. But there is no Shrike vs. Christie reckoning.

The fact of his reckoning at all would put off Eliot and go clearly against the morality of Middlemarch; it also seems it would go equally against the Christian morality from which this is largely based. But revenge is not wrong under all moral systems, though the dangers of revenge are often illustrated exactly as they are here: when an imperfect human passes arbitrary, incorrect, or unfair judgment on someone or something else, and chooses for his revenge something that is thus arbitrary, incorrect, or unfair. Christie wants to take an eye for an eye, but since he can’t, he resorts to imagining equivalent harms for all the harms against him, harming innocents in the process. Christie is reckoning against the world-at-large, against organizations and groups, not against the specific individuals who have harmed him even when they can be identified. And many times they can’t.

Of course, since this is a novel, just like Middlemarch, there is an ultimate reckoner: the author. Eliot, perhaps, uses a mini-miracle to evade the worst outcomes of her moral system, but in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, the narrator pretty blatantly steps in to balance accounts in his own way, putting the world even with Christie in the end—perhaps, at least.

*I am unable to reproduce the actual look of this paragraph on the page; Johnson uses white space extensively here.

War vs. war

2013-03-05T17:18:52Z

The Tournament of Books kicked off this week with a preliminary round featuring three books about the Iraq War. You’ve probably seen this list dozens of times by now so forgive me for noting once more, they are The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers, Fobbit, by David Abrams, and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain.

I have yet to read the first of these books, and at this point the likelihood of my doing so is pretty low, but before completely burning out on the subject mentally (because, of course, I’ve written hardly anything on it—primarily this discussion) I wanted to respond to the selection of Billy Lynn as the round’s winner (and, less specifically, as the winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction).

Billy Lynn seems to be a general favorite among the three books, and in many ways I can see why. Billy himself is a likeable protagonist. His fellow soldiers are fun, and their relationships genuine if not untroubled. These kids are real; they have been through the real shit; and they are going to keep it real at the positive madhouse that is a Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving Day game.

US army officer and writer Nathan Bradley writes at the ToB that he “want[s] to know what the ‘road meat’ thought, what they felt and feared when, limbs still attached, eyes still bright, they were deployed to a country gone unhinged and blood-crazed. Neither Fobbit nor The Yellow Birds does so.” Billy Lynn certainly does, and if that’s what you’re looking for, it’s not a bad place to start. But I’ve been left for a while wondering what exactly Fountain’s novel offers beyond this. The end of the novel, which is supposed to offer some kind of resolution, left me cold (I’m still not sure exactly what was resolved and how), but more importantly I think the novel suffers from some major distractions. Bradley notes that “it would be a great shame if the author’s often naked partisanship alienates some readers—not that I disagree with it, but rather that some Americans are still so tearfully committed to the notion that we were always winning in Iraq, even when it comes to picking books for their local libraries,” but the specific issues he cites as “things that have rubbed conservative readers the wrong way” are not the ones I (not, however, a conservative reader) thought were the worst: “that the bulbous Texans and effusively patriotic rich folks are portrayed as gasbag self-parodies, or that the soldiers do and say bad things (like smoke a joint with a stadium employee, or get in scuffles with patrons, or get in a fight with the Destiny’s Child roadies).” I did think those “effusively patriotic rich folks” were depicted absurdly, but what rankled more was Lynn’s reflexive, unexamined, rather overweening anticonsumerism. A red-blooded Texan himself, Billy does love football, but so many things at the game sicken him.

It’s not like you’re supposed to watch the actual game anyway, no, you watch the Jumbotron, which displays not just the game in real and replay time but a nonstop filler of commercials, a barrage of sensory overload that accounts for far more content than the game itself. Could it be that advertising is the main thing? And maybe the game is just an ad for the ads. It’s too much anyway, what they want from it. Such a humongous burden the game has to bear, so many advertising dollars, such huge salaries, such enormous outlays for physical plant and infrastructure that you can practically hear the sport groaning under the massive load, and the idea of it stresses Billy out, the gross imbalance triggers a tweezing in his gut like the first queasy tugs of a general unraveling.

“It is infuriating, the psyche of the American consumer,” the narrator free-indirectly channels from Billy when he sees a kid without a coat, assuming he doesn’t have proper winter attire though his parents spent hundreds of dollars on Cowboys tickets. Of course, Billy can’t know the kid doesn’t have a coat he simply isn’t wearing, but his default is negative judgment, just as he defaults against advertising and the “burden” of dollars instead of wonder at how a game—a game!—can create so much wealth. On some level, I see this as the idealism of a young man who would probably get off on reading Siddhartha, but I also saw it as extremely hypocritical, considering Billy’s actual getting-off.

What was soothing and not something Billy had even anticipated was the pleasure of masturbating in his old room. …What a luxury not to have to meet your masculine needs in some stinking horror of a port-a-potty, or even worse in a hardpan Ranger grave out in the field with mortal enemies all about and always, always, always some torment of nature with which to content, bugs, rain, wind, dust, extremes of temperature, no misery too small for such a small thing as a man. So give it up for America, yes! And God shed His grace on thee, where a boy can grow up having a room of his own with a door that locks and a bottomless stash of Internet porn.

Why on earth should I take this last sentence as a successfully ironic jab? Are a room of one’s own and internet access not some of the most amazing things to ever happen to humanity? Billy doesn’t want to masturbate outdoors in the middle of sweltering heat and a sandstorm, and I don’t blame him. He wants to judge the appropriateness of others’ decided consumer comfort levels, but would clearly disagree with anyone who thought a port-a-potty was all he really needed. The Jumbotron is what’s bringing you your internet porn, Billy, and it’s all good.

I was also surprised at Bradley’s reaction to Fobbit. Though I have seen a few lukewarm responses so far, I took immediately to Fobbit in a way that Billy Lynn never clicked for me. The idea that Fobbit is, though, of all things “boring,” was a genuine surprise, as was Bradley’s wonder that “anyone unfamiliar with the military could muster the enthusiasm to finish it, unless from purest anthropological curiosity.” I thought Fobbit was funnier than Billy Lynn, and probably more compelling overall, so it just goes to show how subjective these things can be.

But the humor of Fobbit is dark and cynical. That is not to say that Billy Lynn is light or naïve, far from it. As Nathan notes, Fobbit is more in the spirit of Catch-22, but I construe that spirit much more broadly. These are war novels but also novels about the state, the machinery of bureaucracy, and the bizarro world of the cogs therein. It is less ha-ha funny, more horrifying funny. Bradley complains that he doesn’t “really give a damn about Abrams’s Byzantine office drama. Tell me a story.” In my view, the Byzantine office drama is the real story—the cause of all the “road meat,” the cause of everything, and the site of horrific impersonal unaccountability and irresponsibility. Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Harkleroad, one of the more odious characters in the novel and a middle-aged fobbit dedicated to PR, getting nosebleeds, and writing pathetic letters to his church-lady mother, includes this parenthetical in one of them: “Remember, Sunnis are the bad guys, Shi’ites are the good guys—I know, it’s hard for me to remember, too, because the bad guys sound ‘Sunny’ and the good guys sound ‘Shitty’—oops, language again.”

Not only do I find that funny, cloying “oops” included, I also find Harkleroad’s existence dramatically more problematic than that of the Jumbotron or the entire Cowboys apparatus. Billy Lynn seems to rail against American culture broadly in an effort to discredit supporters of the war and their lame patriotism, but if you haven’t already bundled consumerism and patriotism together in a basket labelled something like “ugly brash Americanism,” this may be less than effective. While Fobbit may not be the best bureaucratic satire ever written, it is better than fair (and better than boring) and concerned with problems I consider uglier than brash Americanism.

Full Disclosure: David Abrams is a fellow contributor to BookRiot, though we have never met or directly communicated with each other.

Is the morality of Middlemarch appalling?

2013-03-05T01:21:25Z

As a child, I had a reasonable amount of exposure to, if not very good instruction in, Christianity and its texts. One story I didn’t understand until very recently (as in, a couple months ago when the consumption partner finally explained it to me) was that of The Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). Chances are good that you know it: a man has two sons, the younger asks for his share of the estate in advance, then goes away and squanders the cash. Destitute, he returns home and is welcomed by his father, who “said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate.”

The older son, who’s been home and working hard the whole time, isn’t very happy about this. He refuses to party with the rest of the household, eventually yelling at his dad, “‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’”

Despite knowing now that the point of the story (again, according to the CP) is something like, “God’s reward is equal for everyone,” my only reaction is the same: this shit is completely unfair. And when my man told me this, I immediately shouted back, “Then it’s just like the other one that makes no sense about the workers in the vineyard!” That parable, Matthew 20:1-16, is somewhat less well known, but the gist is that a vineyard owner hires people at different times to do different amounts of work but pays them all the same amount of money.

Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.

Surely you’ve heard the last line, and far be it from me to say the landowner shouldn’t be allowed to pay whatever he wants to whomever he wants, but the point remains that it is completely unfair. And the reason it was impossible for me to understand these stories as religious texts was that I could not see them as anything other than immoral. The prodigal son’s older brother gets completely screwed and his father is a horrible person—no wonder I thought I didn’t “get” it. What I didn’t get was Christian morality.

Which brings me to the actual point at hand, Rohan Maitzen’s excellent essay in this month’s Open Letters Monthly on George Eliot, Middlemarch, and what she characterizes as a “kind of…terrifying” moral philosophy. Eliot may have been a free-thinker, but the morality she develops in her work is a decidedly Christian one. When I wrote about Middlemarch last summer, I didn’t focus overmuch on the sympathy question (except a bit here), which is the key theme of both the novel and Prof. Maitzen’s essay.

Dorothea Brooke and her sad marriage to Mr. Casaubon figure prominently in the piece, in which Maitzen shows how Eliot uses the narrative to forward the moral lessons of sympathy. Late in the novel, it’s clear that Casaubon is near death, and we have seen him from his own point of view as well as Dorothea’s (and those of the other characters in the novel):

Free by now of illusions about the man she married, she can’t help but reflect bitterly on “all the paths of her young hope which she should never find again.” She knows that she is stifling her own needs in service to someone who offers her no corresponding sympathy: “He never knows what is in my mind — he never cares.” “In such a crisis as this,” the narrator warns, “some women begin to hate.”

Dorothea does not, but it’s a close call, and one that turns on her ability to imagine (as the narrator has just helped us to do) the full pathos of Mr. Casaubon’s situation, and to respond (as we have been prompted to do) with charity, rather than condemnation: “He had been asking about the possible arrest of all his work . . . the answer must have wrung his heart.” Finally “the resolved submission did come,” and she emerges from her struggle to offer this unworthy man, once more, her support and compassion.

For Eliot, it is precisely the idea of offering compassion and sympathy to the unworthy—because we are all fallen and flawed and imperfect and thus unworthy—that is the height of morality. But let me repeat: Mr. Casaubon is unworthy. Eminently unworthy. So far below Dorothea on the scale of goodness and worthiness it is not even funny. Maitzen goes on to point out in this specific instance how Eliot’s morality leads to an uncomfortable place:

[T]he dangerous downside of this beautiful idea becomes hard to ignore, and thus our sympathy and admiration might become tinged with fear. Remember: the “lamed creature” in this analogy is not physically but morally deficient. Even when faced with death, Mr. Casaubon does not overcome his “lifelong bias” but remains himself as we have always known him, ignobly preoccupied with “the petty anxieties of self-assertion”….

While Dorothea tenderly imagines him to be grieving for his lost ambitions, he is in fact more concerned with thwarting “possibilities for the future which were somehow more embittering to him than anything his mind had dwelt on before” — specifically, what he believes to be Dorothea’s desire, once freed of him, to marry his cousin Will. He interprets her well-intentioned repression with morbid suspicion, adding to his own paranoid observations.
…
So Mr. Casaubon is not simply as bad as Dorothea believes— he is worse. And when she subordinates herself to him, it’s his petty, vindictive nature that gets free rein, while Dorothea’s generous ardor is stifled by her “nightmare of a life in which every energy was arrested by dread.” The fundamental question of moral philosophy is “how ought I to live?”: how can this be the right answer?

My response is: it’s not. Just because no one is perfect does not mean everyone is equally imperfect. Eliot’s moral philosophy can feel uplifting in the same way many people find Christian morality uplifting; forgiving someone who doesn’t deserve it is graceful. But dessert exists, even if we humans are not always able to get it exactly right. If “Eliot’s morality…is a trap in which the saint rather than the sinner is most likely to suffer,” I’m going to go ahead and say she is wrong. And I would also dispute Maitzen’s defense that “the purpose of ethics is to make us do good, not feel good.” I believe that, but who is to say that giving kindness and happiness to a certified asshole is in any way doing good? It seems, in fact, that to someone who holds altruism as a good in itself, it is more likely to make you feel good while doing wrong. Dorothea feels noble and moral for submitting herself to her awful husband, and Dr. Lydgate feels the same way about submitting himself to his awful wife. In their own cases, they are too legally tied to these people to get away, so it makes some amount of rational sense that they must go along to get along. But their spouses are worse than they are, and Eliot’s morality is concerned far more with altruistic compassion than with justice (or, let’s be real, rationality). If Eliot’s doctrine seems to have “potentially appalling results,” it is at least in part because it is severely unjust.

It’s important to remember, of course, as Maitzen discusses toward the end of the piece, that most people are not the Dorothea Brookes of the world, and I would never claim to be so. Humility, civility, and kindness go a long way. But the idea that “[t]hose of us who are not heroes or rarities can find comfort in Middlemarch precisely because the novel insists that we don’t have to earn sympathy: the moral obligation is all on the other side” also fails to appeal. Justice and fairness are just more my bag. I won’t say I don’t like Middlemarch and find it very persuasive. Insofar as it admonishes people to be kind to each other, especially people who are in relationships and are supposed to love each other, I think it’s right on—but that’s only part of what it’s doing. It’s also telling you to sacrifice yourself on an altar built by assholes, just because. Even Middlemarch needs an authorial “miraculous intervention” in order for this morality not to appear evil and appalling. I’m going to take that as a sign.